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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

PRINCETON, N. J.

BL 51 .B59 1897

Bixby, James Thompson, 1843
1921.

Religion and science as
allies

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22

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

AS ALLIES

OR

SIMILARITIES OF PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS

KNOWLEDGE

BY

JAMES THOMPSON BIXBY

Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Leipzig
Author of '■'•The Crisis in Morals''''

BOSTON
Geo. H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street

1S97

COPYRIGHT

James T Bixby

u Science was Faith once ; Faith were Science now
Would she but lay her bow and arrow by,
And arm her with the weapons of the time."

" In vain would the skeptic make a distinction between science
and common life, or between one science and another. The argu-
ments employed in all, if just, are of a similar nature and contain the
same force and evidence. Or, if there be any difference among them,
tne advantage lies entirely on the side of theology and natural re-
iigion." — Cleanthes, in Hume's " Dialog ces," Part I.

CONTEXTS.

INTRODUCTION.

PASS

The Present Antagonism of Science and ReHgion. — Hurtfulness
of it. — Need of a Reconciliation between them. — Proposed
Method of effecting this, which constitutes the Object of
this Book 7

CHAPTER I.

What is Science ? — What is Religion ? — No Necessary and Right-
ful Antagonism between them, when fully understood . 16

CHAPTER II.

Causes of the Actual Antagonism of the Scientific and the Re-
ligious Worlds. — Ignorance of themselves. — Ignorance of
each other. — Science confounded with Metaphysics and Va-
rious Speculations. — Religion confounded with Ecclesiasti-
cal Organizations and Theological Systems . . .25

CHAPTER III.

The Claim of Religion to possess Exclusive Information, and,
consequently, a Rightful Sovereignty of Knowledge. — Hu-
man Conditions and Fallible Character of Religion. — Divine
Origin of Science. — Help and Correction received by Re-
ligion from Science 44

Q CONTEXTS.

CHAPTER IV.

PAGB

The Claims of Science to possess Exclusive Information and
Rightful Sovereignty of the Realm of Knowledge. — The
Faiths of Science. — Grounds and Methods. — Scientific Em-
ployment of Intuition, Testimony, Authority, Analogy, and
Hypothesis, and Frequent Lack of Verification . . .66

CHAPTER V.

Supposed Differences between Science and Religion in their Aims
and Objects. — Faith of Science in the Supersensual, in the
Immaterial, in the Inconceivable, and in the Infinite . .116

CHAPTER VI.

Supposed Difference between Science and Religion in their Re-
sults.— Uncertainty, Inexactness, and Variability, attach to
Scientific as well as to Theological Results . . .164

'o

CHAPTER VII.

The Scientific Basis of Religion. — Inductive Proof of the Two
Essentials of Theism, the Existence of the Soul and of
God. — Observation of Facts, Classification, Inductions, and
Verification 186

CHAPTER VIII.

Conclusion. — Science and Religion as Fellow-Laborers in the

Divine Service . . . .... 220

PHYSICAL AKD RELIGIOUS
KNOWLEDGE.

IXTRODUCTIOI.

The conflict now going on between the physical
discoveries and theories of these latter days, and the
forms of faith which have hitherto ruled the mind
of Christendom, is one of the most noticeable phe-
nomena of the intellectual movement of the times.
The constant discussions from pulpit and platform,
the numerous essays, pamphlets, and books, in which
these two opponents are arrayed one against the
other, and attack, defense, or effort at reconciliation
made, allow no intelligent man or woman to remain
unaware of the controversy.

It is a fact, so notorious that we need specify no
particular instances nor details, that, by a large part
of the Church, modern science is looked upon as a
godless and blind teacher, a sacrilegious intruder
upon the domain of revealed truth, and that, among
almost all denominations and phases of religious
thought, there has been more or less suspicion, jeal-

8 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

ousy, and abuse of physical investigation. It is a
fact almost equally patent that, on the part of sci-
ence likewise, among many, at least, of its repre-
sentatives, there is a similar hostility entertained
toward religion, and that not only all ecclesiastical
organizations, but all spiritual faith and principles,
are looked upon as their natural foes.

Now, this present antagonism of religion and
science is a matter which may justly give concern,
I believe, to all who have at heart the welfare of
either. It is becoming quite plain to all clear-
sighted observers that religion certainly cannot af-
ford the continuance of any such quarrel.

" The problem of our age," said Archdeacon
Hare, in his life of Sterling, " is to reconcile faith
with knowledge, philosophy with religion. The
men of our age will not believe unless you prove
to them that what they are called upon to believe
does not contradict the laws of their minds, and
that it rests upon a solid and unshaken foundation."

In former conflicts, the struggle had been to
preserve the Church from division, or the orthodox
doctrine from aberrations or perversions.

In the present controversy, the debate concerns
the fundamental ideas of religion. Twenty-five
years ago Dr. Newman said to a sectarian contro-
versialist, "Let us discuss the prospects of Christi-
anity itself, instead of the differences between An-
glican and Catholic." To-day such a change of
front is still more necessary. More than ever be-

IXTRODUCTIOX. 9

fore it is the citadel of Christianity, rather than her
outposts, that needs to be defended. The wise Chris-
tian will turn his arms from these petty skirmishes
about tapers and genuflexions, millinery of priests
and wording of creeds, the sense of Hebrew numer-
als and the supernatural efficacy of drops of water,
to ward off the blows of a nearer enemy — an in-
vader who is pushing his way already with uplifted
battle-axe into the Holy of Holies.

In former assaults upon religion, it was cynics,
and wTorldlings, and doubters of every thing, who
led the attack. Jest and jibe, scoff and sneer, were
the favorite weapons of attack. Believers had only
to stand firm in courage and patience on the unas-
sailed foundations of their faith, and the strong cur-
rents of man's instinctive yearnings would before
long turn the tide of popular opinion the other way,
and bring the Church safely through its peril. To-
day, however, the objections presented against re-
ligion are brought forward in no frivolous spirit,
from no mere feverish mental excitability or love of
innovation, but in the sincerity of an earnest loyalty
to truth, out of a serious desire to get at the reality
of things, through all illusions and at all risks. It
is not ridicule, but reason, that leads the assault.
The weapons are not the clown's bells and grinning
mask, but the astronomer's spectroscope, the biolo-
gist's flask. The scales in which Christianity would
now be tested are not those of universal skepticism,
but of cautious, critical weighing of historic evi-

10 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KXOWLEDGE.

dence and scientific proof. This method, of course,
is a slower one than that of the French encyclope-
dists. Religion has not to fear that any such rapid
and radical revolution can now occur in the belief of
Christendom as was wrought in France in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century. But it is a much
more dangerous course to its adversary. The ground
it gains it keeps. Like an Alpine glacier, its slow,
gigantic plane grinds to powder the most flinty ob-
structions, and never loses a foot of ground that it
has once taken. For four hundred years Science has
driven the Church from post to post. The sphericity
or the flatness of the earth, the mobility or stationa-
riness of the globe, the six days' creation, the six
thousand years' age of the world and of man, the
universal deluge — these all have been battle-fields
where the scientist and the ecclesiastic have met in
conflict, and in every engagement it has been the
ecclesiastic that has been worsted, and the scientist
that has been victorious. The result is, that science
to-day holds such a position that the belief of the
next century may be said to lie in its hands. The
facts that its distinguished savans establish to-day,
in six months will be read in every newspaper and
magazine in the civilized world ; in ten years will
be incorporated in our school-books, and planted in
the forming minds of our children ; in thirty years
will be the creed of every educated man ; and, be-
fore a century has passed, will be the universal be-
lief of all classes. If Christianity cannot harmonize

INTR OB UCTION. \ \

aerself with science, it is much to be feared that the
fate of the Ptolemaic system of the universe will, at
no very distant period, be hers ; at least, no one can
doubt that the future of Religion would be vastly
more sure and prosperous if she could make science
an ally instead of a rival.

ISTor for science, either, is it a matter of indiffer-
ence what its relation toward religion is. AVhile
science stands, or is believed to stand, in an atti-
tude of hostility to religion, it carries an unnecessary
burden, which impedes no little its progress. The
antagonism, whether it be real or only supposed,
weakens its power and circumscribes its sphere of
influence. It diverts its attention from its proper
work to uncalled-for polemics. It vitiates the im-
partiality of judgment and equanimity of tempera-
ment which are required of it. Moreover, it is only,
I venture to say, when science can gain the inspira-
tion of the religious spirit, and be led forward and
upward by such a conviction as animated Kepler,
that, in tracing out the laws of Nature, he was think-
ing God's thoughts after him — it is only when pur-
sued in this mood, I believe, that science can do its
best work.

To bring, then, these two poles of modern thought
into harmonious relations with each other, is a work
of prime importance. On it depend the integrity
and coordination of those two factors of man's high-
er existence — the aspirations of his soul and the per-
ceptions of his intellect — for whose development all

12 PHYSICAL A XL RELIGIOUS KXOWLELGE.

other things are but instrumentalities. It is one of
those questions that cannot be discussed too much.
It may be worn threadbare, but it cannot be shoved
out of sight. The multitude of writings and publi-
cations concerning it but show how profound and
universal is the interest in it. It is because of this
interest that I venture to contribute a few thoughts,
designed, if possible, to clear up some of the compli-
cations and remove some of the oppositions of the
controversy. My purpose is not, I wish it to be
understood, to smooth over any real difficulties, to
bridge an}' natural hiatuses, or to accommodate or
compromise any inherent antagonisms. Such work
is always, I believe, useless, if not mischievous. Nor
is it to do, what so many have essayed, to show de-
tailed coincidences or particular correspondences be-
tween the present results of science and the testi-
mony of the Scriptures ; to demonstrate how the six
days of creation answer to the epochs of modern
geology ; to exhibit the agreement of ethnography
with mankind's descent from "a single couple; to
illustrate by modern hygiene the wisdom of the Le-
vitical regulations ; or to disclose, in expressions of
Job, or David, or Isaiah, anticipations of modern
discoveries. A flexile and ingenious interpreter, not
over-scrupulous about twisting words and forcing
facts, can always do this. As Prof. Huxley has
said, " One never knows what exegetic ingenuity
may make of the original Hebrew." In that grand
storehouse of thought and imagination, that vener-

IXTR OD UCTIOX. 13

able encyclopaedia of all the poetry, science, history,
and philosophy, in which the Jewish mind flowered
under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, in that
Bible whose original and proper name, we should al-
ways remember, is, the Books (ra /3cj3\ta), not the
Book — in that grand storehouse it is always pos-
sible to find plenty of parallels, more or less strong,
for almost every conceivable notion. Each past
generation has found there its favorite theories : in
Tertullian's age, the materiality of the soul ; in Au-
gustine's, the flatness of the earth ; in the time of
the schoolmen, the Aristotelian philosophy : fifty
years ago, the cataclysmal systems of geology, the
Cuvierian distinction of species, the creation from
the dust and primitive enlightenment of man by di-
rect exertion of supernatural power; to-day, it is but
little more difficult to find in the same pages author-
ity or allowance for the nebular hypothesis, the evo-
lution theory, and the savage if not animal origin of
civilized man ; 1 to-morrow, again, the same method
of interpretation may show the coincidence of the
Scriptures with whatever newer discovery Science
may have made, or imagined that she has made. The

1 The Rev. Mr. Mahin, for instance, in a communication to The
Popular Science Monthly, p. 487, August, 1875, says: "Even the
modern doctrine of evolution — Darwinism, if you please — is as nearly
taught in the first chapter of Genesis as in ;he revelations of modern
science ; and spontaneous generation seeus to appear on the very
face of the statements of Moses as therein recorded. Read verses
20 and 24 : ' And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly?
etc. 'And God said, Let the earth bring forth? etc."

14: PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

hunting up of such correspondences is of very little
value for any permanent reconciliation between sci-
ence and religion. As the Dean of Canterbury, Dr.
Payne Smith, has well said,1 " If the wisest geolo-
gist of our days could show that there was an exact
agreement between geology and the Bible, it would
rather disprove than prove its truth. For, as geol-
ogy is a growing science, it would prove the agree-
ment of the Bible with that which is receiving daily
additions, and is constantly undergoing modification,
and ten years hence the two would be at hopeless
variance." The closer the coincidence happens to
be shown in this present hour, the sooner it is likely
disagreement will be revealed by the advancement
of science, and the present interpretation of the sa-
cred text become obsolete and require revision. The
continual varying of her interpretation, and shifting
of her ground, to which Religion is necessitated, when
by this method it seeks reconciliation with physi-
cal knowledge, inevitably throws discredit upon her.
It makes Faith appear as a defendant, continually
obliged to Science for permission to live ; as a satel-
lite reflecting the varying phases of the scientific
primary, rather than as an independent power — the
central, self-subsistent Sun of Righteousness.

My aim, then, contemplates none of these objects
or methods. It is, instead, looking at religion and
science in their broadest and most essential features,

1 P. 175, " Modern Skepticism," Lectures of the Christian Evidence
Society.

1NTR OB UCTION. \ 5

to set forth the underlying unities of physical and
religious knowledge ; the common foundations on
which they really rest ; the similarities of methods,
objects, and general results, which exist between
them, and the actual identity of interests which
binds them together, and which should be acknowl-
edged in word, thought, and action.

16 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER I.

NO NECESSARY ANTAGONISM BETWEEN SCIENCE AND

RELIGION.

Is there any necessary antagonism between Sci
ence and Religion ?

This is the first and main question in determin-
ing their relations. This is the question which all
well-wishers of either ought carefully to examine.
For myself, I find the most thorough search show-
ing an entire absence of any essential incompatibil-
ity. An apparent and de facto conflict exists, and
has existed for centuries. But there is no required
and rightful opposition. For if we look straight at
them, endeavoring to distinguish them from the
many other things that have borne their names and
claimed their dignities, what are they % What, in
strictness, is science % What, exactly, is religion ?
There are no authoritative definitions of either.
There is, probably, no unanimous agreement in
either the scientific world or the religious world as
to the signification of either term. Many and vari-
ous definitions have been proposed. There are few
that are not imperfect. After a careful considera-

NO NECESSAR Y A NTA G ONISM. i 7

tion, I think I ruay say, however, that the following
ought to be accepted, as at least dealing fairly with
both sides in the present question :

For science, there are, in the present day, two
chief significations, differing, however, only in ex-
tent. In its broader sense it signifies all systema-
tized and trustworthy knowledge. It takes, as its
field, all that can be known with reasonable certain-
ty, and affiliated with previous knowledge into a con-
sistent whole. In its narrower and more special
sense, science, in modern times, has come to be re-
stricted to that portion of systematized and certain
knowledge which can he gained by a study of the
physical universe.

Religion has also two main significations :
1. In its most general significance it is the ex-
pression of marts spiritual nature awakening to
spiritual things. As the spiritual nature manifests
itself in the various channels of the human organism,
this expression takes on various forms. Manifested
through the intellect, it gives us religious knowl-
edge or belief ; through the heart, religious senti-
ments and attractions ; through the executive or-
gans, religious worship and action. This expression
of the spiritual nature varies, of course, in strength,
clearness, and elevation. In some, especially in
savage races and early times, it is gross and feeble ;
in others it is intense, pure, and lofty. Primitive-
ly, it gave very likely only a sense of occult intelli-
gent energies, animating the man, the cloud, the

18 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

wind, the sky, looked upon with fear, placated,
shunned, or defied ; ultimately, it rises to a recogni-
tion of a moral and spiritual being in man capable
of eternal existence, and attains also a sense of an
Infinite and Creative Spirit, on whom man is de-
pendent, and to whom he owes gratitude, obedience,
and reverence.

This is the broader signification of religion.

2. In a more special sense it is restricted to the
particular beliefs or knowledges attained to in this
unfolding of the spiritual nature. As these beliefs
or knowledges form the justification for the senti-
ments and action which constitute the rest of re-
ligion, the first come to be spoken of as the whole
of religion. Of these beliefs, some are inessential,
some essential. Where the line should be drawn
has been hotly disputed, and every one, almost,
makes a different enumeration. It seems to me
that only three can be properly regarded as neces-
sary to the very existence of religion :

1. Belief in a soul within man.

2. Belief in a sovereign Over-soul without.

3. Belief in actual or possible relations between
them.

Now, if the significations of science and reli-
gion may be taken to be substantially such as they
have just been given, there is certainly no rightful
antagonism between them.

Looking at the relations of the two from the

NO NECESSAR Y ANTAGONISM. 1<J

point of view of the first definition of science, i. e.,
systematized knowledge in general, then religion in
its first signification, as the expression of man's
spiritual nature, would be just a part of the facts
which science is to study and systematize. The
sentiments of gratitude and aspiration, the peculi-
arities of worship, the forms of belief which reli-
gious history exhibits, are just as much phenomena
of the world, just as much facts of the Kosmos, as
the markings of a fiower or the transformation of a
butterfly. Nay, they are the noblest and the most
significant of phenomena, and Science could never
claim to be complete if it did not receive them as a
subject of inquiry and systematization. The result
of such an inquiry and systematization of spiritual
facts would constitute religious science. Religion,
in the more special sense, "the particular knowl-
edges or beliefs attained to by the awakening of
man's spiritual nature," more or less coincides with
this, and forms a subdivision of science, just in the
degree that its doctrines are valid and systematically
coordinated with each other and the facts which
were their data. Normally, then, science is not
complete till religion, in its general signification, be-
comes one of its objects of investigation, and, in its
special signification, becomes a part of science itself.
Science can no more have grounds for a quarrel with
religion than she can have grounds for a quarrel with
the phenomena of atomic affinity, molecular vibra-
tion and molar attraction and repulsion, or be at

20 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

odds with, the systematization of these phenomena
into laws of chemistry and electricity, and with the
inferring from them of chemical and electrical forces
as causes. If the phenomena of religion appear in-
congruous with other phenomena, they are not there-
fore to be denied, or ignored, or ridiculed, but studied
with the more care, as likely to reveal new laws and
causes. If the laws and causes at present assigned
to them seem erroneously inferred, it is the business
of Science to assist Religion in making a better sys-
tematization of her facts.

Looking at the question next from the stand-point
of the more special sense of science, the systematized
knowledge derived from the study of the physical
universe, then religion, both in its general and spe-
cial sense, would, to a certain extent, stand outside
of science. Science and religion would each have
in a certain sense separate fields, or rather separate
beginnings and points of view. They would not
then be antagonistic, but supplementary. If, now,
looking at different realms of the Kosmos, they
should both come to the same result on any point,
such as the existence of God or the soul, the agree-
ment of such independent investigations would have
especial weight. But, if they should fail to see ex-
actly the same thing, this would not put them into
antagonism, but rather would be what we should ex-
pect. Diverse posts of observation naturally give
diverse views, especially when the subject of study,
as in this case, is immense and complex. Positive

NO NEC ESS A R Y ANT A G ONISM. 2 1

testimony, of course, would have to be received
from both, and united as well as might be. But
negative testimony from one side would be of no
avail to contradict the positive testimony from the
other. Because the touch feels none of the sound-
vibrations of the air, this throws no discredit on the
testimony of the ear that it hears sounds. The fact
that the eye sees no odor come from the flower es-
tablishes no antagonism between it and the olfactory
organ that smells it. If physical science reports that,
neither by the balance, the dissecting-knife, nor the
lens, it has found trace of any spiritual Being, this
no more disproves the direct testimony of the reli-
gious faculties, that by their methods and organs they
do find it, than the inability of the spiritual facul-
ties to discover the laws of motion and matter dis-
proves the testimony of science to them. If the in-
vestigation of Nature should not disclose anywhere
(though I believe it does everywhere) evidence of a
First Cause, this would no more contradict religion
than the failure of religion to disclose the secondary
causes of phenomena contradicts science. The word
of each is good for its own account, and in its own
sphere. Contradiction, and necessary antagonism,
would arise only by one establishing the non-exist-
ence of the other's domain, and the entire fictitious-
ness of the sources of knowledge it claims, a thing
which either of the two would have to step squarely
outside of its own proper field even to begin to at-
tempt. Modern physical science, especially, could

22 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

not rightfully essay this, for one of its cardinal prin-
ciples is the unity of the whole universe, the latent
truth and reality of all persistent forces. In point
of fact, the extreme outcome of modern scientific re-
searches essays no disproof of the religious theories
of the world, nor any demonstration that there is no
God in the world, nor soul in man, but simply pre-
sents a confession of the insufficiency of physical in-
quiry to attain, as yet, by inductive methods, a similar
result. Nay, it does not seek to deny, but it openly
avows, that there is an infinite mystery behind and
beneath all the phenomena which it studies, all the
laws it has formulated, all the secondary causes it
has reached. Some men of science, it is true, from
this inability of their own processes, as yet, to fathom
the mystery, deny that any method or faculty can
fathom it. But this is no correct inference. It i-.
instead, a groundless, a thoroughly unscientific as-
sumption. It is the faith of science that progress in
knowledge is unending. The man of science must
be always seeking. To identify the limit where prog-
ress is at present arrested with the absolute limit of
possible knowledge is opposed to the whole spirit of
modern inquiry. Nor, if Science concludes that its
own methods and instruments are unavailing to reach
religious truth, is that a reason for rejecting also the
testimony which the spiritual faculties have from of
old given to spiritual things? Rather, it is an ad-
monition to the earnest seeker to turn in prefer-
ence to this other oracle as the. proper interpreter

NO NEC ESS AR Y ANT A G ONISM. 23

of the divine mysteries, and the better guide to its
treasures.

From the scientific stand-point, then, there is no
rightful quarrel between Science and Religion.

Is there any from the religious stand-point?
What is there in this expression of man's spiritual
nature, in any of its legitimate manifestations, that
demands of it to draAv a sword against knowledge of
any kind ? Which one of these expressions of the
spiritual nature is it that needs to fight physical
science ? Is it love, aspiration, reverence, self-sacri-
fice, or any other of the religious sentiments ? Is it
philanthropy, purity, justice, consecration, or any
other element of the religious life? Surely, none
of these may properly combat science. Nor has the
intellectual expression of the spiritual nature, the
fundamental beliefs which, in a special sense, are
called religion, any better reason for opposition to
science. For the religious believer, just in propor-
tion to the strength of his belief in the Creative
Power, the Divine Omnipotence and Omnipresence,
must believe that Nature is no independent power,
man's perceptive and reasoning faculties no unmean-
ing or deceptive instruments, but that both physical
and human nature are works of God, existing as
he wishes them to exist, reflecting his mind and
purposes, and therefore trustworthy witnesses of
him. No opening of men's eyes to the facts of the
world, no disclosing of the actual methods and laws
of the Creation, can do any thing else (so the truly

24 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

religious should believe) than reveal the more clear-
ly the existence and character of their Maker. It
may reveal him as acting in ways that we had not
supposed. It may compel Theology to revise its
schemes. But this revision Religion must look upon
as received from God's own hand, and simply bring-
ing us nearer the divine reality and truth. He who
confounds the march of intellect with the opera-
tions of the devil, evidently inclines to trace his
own origin to Satan rather than to believe the word
of Scripture, that man was made in the image of
God, and that God saw all the works that he had
made, and behold they were good. To the intelli-
gent Theist, the record which the geologist deci-
phers in the rocks is a revelation written by the
same divine linger as that other revelation which
the theologian reads in the Psalms of David or the
letters of Paul. To the enlightened Christian there
is truth to be learned about God everywhere in the
material and moral universe ; and no religious stud-
ies can be regarded as complete or satisfactory that
neglect or ignore that grand source of divine in-
struction which God's handiwork presents to us.

CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 25

CHAPTER II.

CAUSES OF THE ACTUAL ANTAGONISM OF THE SCIEN-
TIFIC AND THE RELIGIOUS WORLD.

Religion and Science, then, have no good cause
for antagonism, but rather for amity and sympathy.
"Why, then, should they have had so many apparent
conflicts ; why should there be so much jealousy,
suspicion, and ill-feeling, between scientific and re-
ligious bodies ?

There are many causes. But the main ones are
these three : First and chief, ignorance. Few of the
religious have understood religion. They have been
familiar, of course, with its practical applications ;
the forms of worship ; the moral and philanthropical
duties which it has demanded. Thev have studied
carefully Scripture texts, and writings of the fathers,
and the creeds of the councils ; but about the funda-
mental principles of religion, its real grounds, lim-
its, and proper domain, there has been a great lack
of knowledge.

Similarly, few scientific men have really com-
prehended science. Facts of chemistry, of astrono-
my, of geology, they have learned with wonderful
2

26 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

thoroughness ; but the principles of scientific inves-
tigation, its capabilities and limits, the)' have known
little of. Physicists speak familiarly of scientific
method, bnt " they could not," says Prof. Jevons,1
" readily describe what they mean by that expres-
sion. Profoundly engaged in the study of particu-
lar classes of natural phenomena, they are usually too
much engrossed in the immense and ever-accumu-
lating details of their special sciences, to generalize
upon the methods of reasoning which they uncon-
sciously employ." Prof. Jevons's words find a no-
ticeable illustration in the fact that the only consid-
erable treatises upon scientific method, or the prin-
ciples of physical inquiry which have been written
in the present century, Mill's "Logic of the In-
ductive Sciences," Whewell's "Philosophy of the
Inductive Sciences" and "History of Scientific

%J

Ideas," and Jevons's own " Principles of Science,"
are all the works of metaphysicians rather than of
physicists, of mental philosophers rather than natu-
ral philosophers. And if few, either of the religious
or the scientific world, have reallv understood the
principles and proper limits of their own studies,
still fewer have understood the principles and prop-
er sphere of the other. Prof. Trowbridge, in a re-
cent number of The Popular Science Monthly,
called attention to the insufficient acquaintance of

1 Preface to " The Principles of Science," by W. Stanley Jevons,
Professor of Logic and Political Economy in Owens College, Man-
chester, England.

CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 27

ministers of religion with science. He quoted the
courses of study presented in our principal theologi-
cal schools, and showed how very small a measure
of attention was given to physical studies, and how
absurdly some preachers deliver their ignorant ipse
dixits upon scientific topics. Although theologi-
ans are continually declaring, that the most danger-
ous enemy of religion to-day is science, they seem
to have gained no realizing sense of the fact, and
what it demands of them. They still imagine that
the battle of the Evidences is to be fought on the
Held of ecclesiastical history, scriptural exegesis, and
metaphysical postulates. They still practise with
dictionary and concordance, as if the age of crucible
and spectroscope had not come in. The great need
of our theologians to-day is, to recognize the mighty
turn which modern thought has taken, the new base
of operations which it demands, and the new weap-
ons it requires. As Hugh Miller said years ago,
" Before the churches can be prepared, competently,
to deal with the infidelity of an age so largely en-
gaged as the present in physical pursuits, they must
greatly extend their walks into the field of physical
science." A hasty reconnaissance now and then to
gather information to justify an attack is not what
is wanted, but a careful and impartial examination
of the scientific domain, and its relations with the
religious realm. Even " from men who admire the
progress of science," says Prof. Trowbridge, " I often
hear sermons" which "do incalculable damage, by

28 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

drawing wide and unwarrantable inferences and con-
clusions from scientific facts."

Equally inadequate is the acquaintance of men
of science with religion. If there are among the
clergy parsons so impervious to modern knowledge
that they still believe that the earth is flat and im-
movable, and that the fossils of the Silurian period
are the remains of creatures drowned in the Flood,
there are likewise those who claim to be men of
science who are so ill-informed and undeveloped in
spiritual things as to doubt the usefulness of devo-
tion, look on Christianity as a work of fraud, and
religion and morality as mere products of fear and
custom. It does not need to be argued, I think,
that religion is not a thing to be understood at a
glance by every one who is not a born fool. Spirit-
ual things need special, systematic, thorough study for
their clear comprehension just as much as physical
things ; and the man of science who essays, because
he is skillful with acids and alkalies, or has made
notable discoveries about sound, or heat, or protozoa,
to pronounce judgment on the problems of prayer
and providence, or the knowability of God, such a
man is just as likely to talk nonsense as the minister
who denounces Darwinism without having read a
tithe of the scientific expositions and evidence of it.
Yet it is not an uncommon occurrence, of late, to
see men of science indulge in such intellectual esca-
pades. Dazzled by their marvelous achievements in
measuring the stellar spaces and recovering the his-

CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 29

tory of extinct species, physical investigators have
fancied that Bacon and the modern instrument-mak-
ers have supplied them with the keys of universal
knowledge, and with unhesitating confidence have
pronounced from their scientific platforms just what
the world must believe about divine personality,
goodness, spiritual existence, and such other pro-
found problems as the great Christian thinkers have
spent their lives in finding and expounding the best
solutions of. It is not strange if the religious world
should be considerably amazed, and somewrhat in-
dignant, at the crude structures which have resulted
when these scientific Babel-builders, taking atom and
molecule for their onlv architectural materials, have
essayed to push up their materialistic towers into
the very heaven.

Now, this ignorance of themselves and each other
has, and must, as long as it lasts, work evil to both re-
ligion and science. Unacquainted with the strength
of each other's positions, they are prone to treat each
other with indifference or contempt. Knowing not
their own proper domain, or that of the other, they
will be likely to encroach upon territory that is not
their own, or consider themselves invaded or insult-
ed without cause. The sight of blunders and bun-
gles committed in these foreign excursions, tends to
destroy their authority and respect for their knowl-
edge in their own home-province. " Nothing leads
thinking young men of scientific tendencies," says
Prof. Trowbridge, "to neglect church-going more

30 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

than wrong-headed and illogical deductions from
science by their pastors." And, similarly, I may
add, " nothing leads Christians to dislike and ignore
scientific teaching more than the gross misrepresen-
tations of pure religion too often given by scientific
lecturers." It is those who are most ignorant of
modern investigations, and most unfitted by their
whole education to discern their bearing, who most
freely launch the theological thunder-bolts at them,
as impious and godless. And it is those who know
least of the essence of religion and the grounds on
which it is based, who sneer at them as old wives'
fables, unworthy the serious consideration of any
savant. Every such uncalled-for attack on one side
or the other widens the breach between them. Could
each know the other more thoroughly, most of this,
I believe, might be escaped. As one of our Ameri-
can preachers said recently in an address to medical
students,1 " If the clergy could ramble with Mr. Hux-
ley over the glaciers, and Mr. Huxley would take an
excursion into the fields of Christian history, we
should have better clerical sermons and better lay
sermonsP

Ignorance of themselves and each other is, then,
the first and main cause of that antagonism between
science and religion which, though it can have no
de jure reign, has yet had an undeniable de facto

1 Delivered to the graduating class of the New York College of
Physicians and Surgeons, 18*75, by Rev. E. A. Washburn, D. D.

CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 31

existence. From this main cause there have flowed
two subordinate ones :

1. A confounding of both religion and science
with other things.

2. The claiming by each of exclusive knowledge,
and, in consequence of it, a supremacy over the
other.

These must be examined somewhat in detail.

First, ignorance of the true nature of religion
and science has led to confounding them with other
things. All science, certainly, does not deserve the
sneering appellation which some clergymen are fond
of employing — of " science falsely so called." But
not a few things that pass for science have no real
claim to the title. They are but metaphysical falla-
cies, probable hypotheses, or conjectures spawned in
the fertile fancy of scientific dabblers, embraced by
anti-religious prejudice, and wind-blown by conceit
and love of sensation into every puddle of superfi
cial Nature-knowledge.1

So it is also with religion. It is not all false-
hood and masquerade ; nevertheless, there is much,
popularly set down as religion, which is no more
religion than it is science. Now it has been bound
up with one system, now with another. When

1 " There is a great deal of what I cannot but regard as fallacious
and misleading philosophy (' oppositions of science falsely so called ')
abroad in the world at the present day." — (Dr. Carpenter's Address
at Brighton, in 1872, as President of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science.)

32 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

Christianity first raised its head, it was told that
polytheism alone was religion. When Protestant-
ism first ventured to send Christians directly and
personally to the Bible and their own private judg-
ment, religion, it was declared, meant simply the
Roman Church, and all else was infidelity. In Au-
gustine's day, Christianity was made inseparable
from the doctrines of predestination and fatalism.
In Abelard's time it was bound up with the meta-
physics of realism ; in Roger Bacon's, with the
philosophy of Aristotle ; in the days of Yesalius,
with the medical treatises of Galen ; in the life-
time of Galileo, with the astronomy of Ptolemy.
To-day it is the orthodoxy of the Council of Trent
or the Westminster Catechism that is cemented to
religion, and any attack on the one is assumed to
be undermining the very foundations of faith and
morals.

]STow, it is this false science, and this false reli-
gion— this confounding of other things, different in
character, with these two great factors of human
welfare (a confusion the more readily occurring be-
cause of the sanction that both the scientific and the
religious worlds have given to it), that has led to the
belief that there is a natural antagonism between
physical inquiry and spiritual faith. These other
powers may be natural opponents to Science, or
natural opponents to Religion, or natural oppo-
nents to each other, and, walking in the guise of
Science and Religion, readily give the appear-

CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 33

ance of a continual and rightful conflict between
them.

There are metaphysical doctrines, for example,
that are inimical to the very existence of religion ;
and these metaphysical doctrines may happen to be
adopted by certain scientific authorities, become cur-
rent in scientific circles, and be expounded as if they
were scientific truths. Auguste Comte, for instance,
laid it down as the characteristic of the advance of
knowledge from the Theological and Metaphysical
stage to the Positive or truly Scientific stage, that it
should be recognized that only phenomena, their
coexistences and sequences, were knowable ; and
Causes, especially the First Cause, beyond the pos-
sibility of our knowledge. Herbert Spencer, Prof.
Tyndall, Prof. Huxley, and many other popular sci-
entific authorities have, again and again, in scientific
lectures and treatises, taken occasion to lay it down
as one of the fixed things which the physical in-
quirer should recognize and respect, that the Su-
preme Eeality is utterly unknowable. Were these,
indeed, truths of science, then Eeligion would have
no enemy more to be dreaded ; for, if the God
whom she has worshiped and prayed to, and taken
as her lawgiver, and believed that she has held com-
munion with, is absolutely unknowable — then, in-
deed, no place is left for her on the earth. Not
" worship, mainly of the silent sort," as Prof. Hux-
ley advises, but the absolute suppression of every
worshiping instinct and reverent thought, becomes

34 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

her. But, without discussing at all here this great
question of the knowability of God, I would point
out what hardly ought to be required to be men-
tioned, that this contest lies in a field quite outside
of the beat of Science. Science can declare what it
has found and does know, and what it has not yet
found out and does not yet know ; but, as to what
it is possible or impossible to know, as to what are
the necessary and absolute limits of the human mind
— this is a question of metaphysics, not of science.
The whole argument proceeds through a discussion,
not of physical things, but of mental and spiritual —
laws of thought, analyses of consciousness, contra-
dictions of logic. It is a question in which all the
chief arguments, pro and con, were elaborated before
modern Science was born. If scientific authorities
chose to borrow or reiterate what Lao-Tse, Kant,
Hamilton, or Mansel, have argued, that does not
transform the old metaphysics into modern science,
but simply exhibits modern scientists as amateur
metaphysicians.

Again, there are speculations and theories op-
posed to religion, which are often indulged in by
scientific men, and passed off for genuine science.
Such, for example, is the bald materialism that
would make matter the sum and substance of all
things; self-existent and alone immortal; life, its
complex product ; thought, a motion of it ; will,
the direction of its current. Such is the scientific
naturalism, still more prevalent, perhaps, among

CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 35

physical inquirers, in which the uniformity per-
ceived within the narrow field of human observa-
tion is set up as an absolute necessity ; succession of
phenomena is made the only reality ; its chain of
antecedents the only origin; and its law the only
God. These theories may have a ^wm'-scientific ba-
sis; they may be advocated by students, teachers,
and writers of the scientific world ; but, nevertheless,
they have no claim to call themselves science ; they
have never been accepted by a majority of the scien-
tific world ; no proper and sufficient scientific author-
ity, data, or reasoning, indorses them ; no scientific
verification of them is possible. Their dogmas, as-
suming for matter eternal and exclusive existence;
asserting for our narrow experience universality and
necessity ; claiming, in regard to phenomena, a
knowledge that there is nothing more behind it
than is seen on its surface; denying altogether finite
or infinite spirit ; repudiating the intuitions of
cause and substance — transcend altogether the ex-
perimental conditions which these same schools
make the limit of knowledge and the criterion of
truth. Inductive Science would have to renounce
its functions, and assume quite a different role, be-
fore it could legitimately make any such declara-
tions. As Dr. Carpenter said at Brighton, in 1872,
in his address to the British Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science, " Those who set up their own
conceptions of the orderly sequence which they dis-
cern in the phenomena of Nature as fixed and deter-

36 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

mined laws, by which those phenomena not only
are (within all human experience), bnt always have
been, and always must be, invariably governed, are
really guilty of the intellectual arrogance which
they condemn in the systems of the ancients, and
place themselves in diametrical antagonism to those
real philosophers by whose comprehensive grasp
and penetrating insight that order has been so far
disclosed." And again, toward the close of his ad-
dress: "When Science, passing beyond its own lim-
its, assumes to take the place of Theology, and sets
up its own conception of the order of Nature as a
sufficient account of its cause, it is invading a prov-
ince of thought to which it has no claim, and not
unreasonably provokes the hostility of those who
ought to be its best friends."

Or, to pass to the things that, in the name of re-
ligion, have opposed science : ecclesiastical hierar-
chies have always been, and almost inevitably are,
hostile to its progress. They are opposed to all prog-
ress. Their one great thought is, to preserve their
privileges, to maintain and heighten their authority.
When a religious movement grows into a church, it
is as when the young polyp grows into the coral.
At first tiny, soft-bodied, changeable, ranging at
will, as it increases in size it loses its freedom and
pliancy, attaches itself to some rock, becomes im-
movable, solid, itself a part of the rock. To new
ideas it can henceforth give, at best, only a stolid
apathy, a stony rebuff. Fortunate is the issue if it

CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 37

does not heave its ponderous weight upon the rash dis-
turber of its peace, and crush him to powder. Alas !
how many tragic instances of this are written in blood
and tire upon the pages of church history! Colum-
bus, overwhelmed bv the theologians at Salamanca
with biblical proof against a new world ; Kopernik,
suppressing his heliocentric theory of the heavens
for thirty-six years, and escaping persecution only
by death ; Galileo, tortured and compelled to recant
his declaration that the earth moves ; Giordano Bru-
no, burnt alive for daring to assert a plurality of
worlds — such are the disgraceful illustrations of the
enmity of the Roman hierarchy to the progress of
physical knowledge. But do any of these facts show
a conflict between Religion and Science ? Not one
of them. Neither the Roman Church nor any other
church is identical with religion. No ecclesiastical
body is synonymous with religion. All such bodies
are structures of men, social institutions. Religion
is no human construction, any more than the force
of gravitation, or the vital force, or the yearnings
of the loving heart. It is a force anterior to all
churches and hierarchies, the grand spiritual stream
flowing from above through the souls of men, of
which ecclesiastical organizations are but the earth-
ly banks, the clayey reservoirs and wooden dams
by which men have thought they could better util-
ize the heavenly forces. Doubtless religion is in
the Church, and the Church more or less representa-
tive of religion ; but by no means so exclusively and

38 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

purely is the Church filled and moved by religion,
that the voice of the latter may be taken as the voice
of the former. Besides religion, the Church has al-
ways contained, and still contains, much else — tradi-
tion, prejudice, love of power, superstition. The
clamor of these often confuses and drowns the still,
small voice of religion.

Again, theological dogmas and science have been,
and still are, opposed. Theologians have formulated
their dim guesses about God's character and ways
into creeds, and imagined them finalities. They
have speculated upon matters of purely physical
knowledge, such as the antiquity of the earth and
the age of man, the condition of the primitive globe
and its inhabitants, the manner and method of their
appearings, and have made these speculations into
dogmas held as essential to religion. Thus, holding
sway beforehand, by right of what might be called
squatter sovereignty, over a large part of the field
of scientific inquiry, and having consecrated as sa-
cred edifices the rude and hasty structures raised
by its early conjectures, when Science advances to
take possession of its own, there results naturally a
conflict. The different stand-points from which Sci-
ence observes, the more thorough examination which
it is its aim to make, give a more or less different
representation of truth. Science must clear the
ground of what it deems erroneous mental construc-
tions before it can erect the systems which it believes
to be truer. And Theology has become so convinced

CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 39

of the divine accuracy of its own models of the Cre-
ator and the creation, that if the old lines be altered
ever so little, if new elements be suggested as con-
stituting the constructive material, or an architect-
ural power, different from that which the ancient
guide-books narrate, be hinted at as the method by
which it was built, or if even one of the withered
ivies that had darkened its windows be pulled away,
then it seems to Theology as if desecration had been
committed, the creation robbed of its divineness,
and the Creator banished into nonentity.

All theologies are liable thus to get in the way of
Science ; but in current Christian theology there are
two dogmas in particular that have especially created
antagonism. The first is the assumed infallible inspi-
ration of the whole Bible ; the second the assumed
intervention of God in the order of Nature, or the
special presence of Deity in that which is mysteri-
ous, exceptional, or lawless. In consequence of the
first of these dogmas, there has been a struggle by
theologians to limit modern science to the contract-
ed circle of the ancient Hebrew knowledge of the
universe, and any variation of statement from the
letter of Moses or Job, David or Paul, is regarded
as a dangerous loosening of another screw in the
bonds of righteousness and the evidences of immor-
tality.

In consequence of the second dogma, theologians
have been jealous of any attempt at a natural ex-
planation of the mysteries of the world, and have

4-0 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

looked upon every extension of the realm of un-
broken order and second causes as an invasion by
Science of the religious kingdom. They imagine
that one must lose whatever the other gains ; that,
step by step, as the arcana of the Kosmos are pene
trated, and the same laws and substances are found
ruling and constituting these, as rule and constitute
the more familiar parts and operations of Nature,
the action and presence of Deity must be denied,
and the human mind landed more and more in the
slough of a godless materialism.

But these also are antagonisms which faith is not
responsible for, and which Theism does not com-
mand. These are quarrels in which pure and unde-
filed Religion is never present as a combatant. The-
ology is not religion, but the theoretical system men
erect over and about religion. " The aspiring song of
the spirit is one thing, the attempt to write its score,
define its nature and explain its methods and its sig-
nificance, quite another thing." There are many the-
ologies, and each theology has many dogmas. Reli-
gion is an essence which was before all, which gave
to all their original life, but remains identical with
none. Least of all is it to be identified with a dogma
that divorces ordinary Nature from God, confines
his working to the dark corners of his creation, and
recognizes him only where some overthrowal or in-
terruption of his previous or customary work is sup-
posed to be discovered. It is not only an equally
religious view, but a far more religious view, it

CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 41

seems to me, that sees God present in every ordi-
nary occurrence and lowest substance, pouring his
will through the channels of unvaried law, and
binding antecedent to consequent in an unnawed
succession.

Neither is religion based on nor bound up with
any one book. Had Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, no
religion, because Moses had not yet written? Was
there no Christianity in the lifetime of Jesus, or
the first forty years of the apostolic generation, be-
fore Matthew put his pen on to parchment? As
well say that chemical affinity is based on Lavoisier's
or Dalton's treatises, or that gravitation is ruined if
Xewton's "Principia" is shown false in a single the-
orem. Religion is the root from which what is di-
vine and spiritual in Old and ISew Testament has
blossomed. But the manifold other growths, of his-
tory, poetry, allegory, chronology, cosmogony, which
pious reverence bound up in the same venerated
chaplet, must not be confounded with the grand
moral and religious truths that have given the an-
cient Semitic writings an incomparable place in sa-
cred literature. " Physical and metaphysical sci-
ence," to quote the Dean of Canterbury again,1
" alike lie remote from the object-matter of revela-
tion. Because God has in the Bible given us reve
lation in an informal way, in order, perhaps, to com-

1 " Science and Revelation," by R. Payne Smith, D. D., Dean of
Canterbury, Late Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford. "Modern
Skepticism," " Lectures of the Christian Evidence Society," p. 173.

42 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

mend it to our entire nature, people often forget
that its proper object-matter is simply the moral re-
lation in which man stands to God, especially with
relation to a future state of being. Religious men
forget this. They often take up an antagonistic
position to science, and try to make out systems of
geology, and astronomy, and anthropology, from the
Bible, and from these judge all that scientific men
say. Really, the Bible never gives us any scientific
knowledge in a scientific way. If it did, it would
be leaving its own proper domain."

In fine, to come to the secret of the dissension,
new kinds of knowledge, or unusual theories of any
kind, naturally find themselves opposed by the old
beliefs — whatever be their nature — which occupied
the ground before them. The old is unwilling to
give up its time-honored reign. The new wants to
push out the old, to obtain more room for itself.
Now, what is old, whether it be really ancient phi-
losophy, ancient custom,1 ancient myth, or ancient

1 Euripides, for example, puts the following into the mouth of
Greek orthodoxy : " The divine might is slow to come forth, but sure
nevertheless ; and it chastises those mortals who foster insensate ob-
stinacy, who from mad opinion refuse to exalt the institutions of the
gods. Subtly and perseveringly do they hide their feet in ambush
and catch the impious man. For never should we indulge convic-
tions and meditations which are wiser than established practices.
For cheap is the effort to believe that the Divinity, whatever else he
may be, is not powerful ; and what comes from long time is estab-
lished eternally, and inheres in Nature." — (Euripides, Larch., 882-
896.) The impiety here rebuked consisted in disapproving of Bac-
chanalian orgies !

VA.U8E8 OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 43

physical speculation, or any thing else no more iden-
cal with religion, has always been apt to lay claim
to a sacred character. And what is new, whether it
be, in fact, new metaphysics, new religion, or new
speculation of any kind, is in these days equally apt
to dub itself by the title of Science. But surely the
old, merely as old, is no more to be identified with
religion than the new. Though tradition may al-
ways claim Religion as her champion, Religion is not
therefore responsible for Tradition's acts. Scientific
men, as well as priests and churches, have sought to
bolster themselves by appeals to the odium theologi-
cum. Even the illustrious Leibnitz charged the sys-
tem of Newton with having an irreligious tendency.
And Religion, when new, is as apt as Science to be
accused of impiety. If any body of men were ever
filled with the thought of God, surely the early
Christians were ; and yet, one of the charges which
the Roman polytheists brought against them was
that of atheism. It is not religion, then, but tradi
tion, that opposes the new ; and it is not the new
any more than the old that is the scientific. If all
uncommon theories and recent-born speculations be
science, how many scientific carcasses line the path
of history !

44 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

CHAPTER in.

THE CLAIM OF .RELIGION TO POSSESS EXCLUSIVE KNOWL-
EDGE AND CONSEQUENT DIVINE SUPREMACY. HU-
MAN CONDITIONS OF RELIGION. DTVINE ORIGIN OF

SCIENCE. HELP RECEIVED BY RELIGION FROM SCI-
ENCE.

Secondly, there are the claims made by both
Science and Religion of exclusive knowledge, and. as
a result of this, a rightful supremacy over the other.

I take up first the claim of Religion. It is one
of the most ancient claims of Religion that to her
has been given truth in its absolute purity, direct
from Heaven. Scientific investigations are but blind
human gropings. There is nothing divine or heaven-
descended in them. But religion is a revelation
from the Creator himself, conveying absolute and
final truth. No human admixture alloys its cer
tainty; no sense-experience nor logical demonstra-
tions are needed to make it credible ; no further
principles are to be sought for. God has unveiled
to man in advance all the information about spiritual
things which it is essential for him to have. For
the human understanding to pick and dig about

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. ±$

these foundations is either superfluous or injurious.
If its investigations agree with the divine revela-
tion, they are but a waste of energy. If they dis-
agree, they are beyond doubt mischievous mislead-
ings. Religious truths are not like scientific truths.
Spiritual phenomena are not like material phenom-
ena. They are to be gazed at reverently, not searched
into with microscope and dissected with lancet.
They should be accepted in faith, not criticised by
impious reason. Of eternal and infinite importance,
as they are, what is man that he should set himself
up as their judge? "In the things of God," Mr.
Mansel tells us to-day, as Augustine, and Aquinas,
and Calvin, and Edwards, and the great Church au-
thorities in every century, have told the world, " Rea-
son is beyond her depth, and we must accept what
is established, or we must believe nothing."

Almost every branch of the Church claims more
or less of this exclusive knowledge. Each has some
oracle whose voice must be accepted as authoritative,
and whose message as divine truth, unmixed with
the dross of common human knowledge, needing
not that examination and verification which other
kinds of truth require before it is worthy to claim
man's credence.

At its lowest term, this oracle is merely the
spiritual intuition, the voice within the breast. In
its next higher form, it is the word of the religious
master ; in Islam, of Mohammed ; in Buddhism, of
Sakya-Mouni ; in Christianity, of Jesus. At a third

£6 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

stage, it presents as infallible every verse of some
sacred book — Yeda, Koran, Bible. At its highest
term, the Church, or, perhaps, its official head, High-
priest, Grand-Llama, Mikado, or Pope, becomes the
vicegerent of God, and the exclusive declarer of
divine truth.

Believing that in herself she has thus a special,
direct, and unerring source of divine knowledge, Re-
ligion naturally is disinclined to admit the possibility
that she has made mistakes, or that Science is com-
petent to correct her, or to find out religious truths
undiscovered by her. The investigations of Science
are very well as long as they confirm the Scriptures,
and sustain the Church ; but to stray from the ortho-
dox pathway, to criticise or contradict what Penta-
teuch or Papal College has laid down, is a sacrilege.
Evangelical Protestantism, by instance after instance,
has disclosed its unwillingness to allow to Science
any other position than that of a subordinate and a
satellite ; and the Roman Church has explicitly and
officially declared the absolute supremeness of the
Church in all such matters, and the wickedness of
looking upon Science as capable of correcting the
interpretations of the Church. In the General Coun-
cil of the Roman Church, held in 1870, known as
the Vatican Council, it was denned to be " a doc-
trine divinely revealed, that when the Roman
Pontiff speaks ex cathedra .... he possesses that in-
fallibility with which the Divine Rdeeemer willed
his Church to be endowed. . . . The pastors and

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 47

faithful, of whatever rite and dignity, are bound by
the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obe-
dience " in reference to doctrines thus defined by
the pope. And in regard to human science, in par-
ticular, the position previously taken by the Papal
See was ratified by the formal decree :

" Let him be anathema —

"Who shall say that human sciences ought to
be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one
may be allowed to hold as true their assertions even
when opposed to revealed doctrines ;

" Who shall say that it may at any time come to
pass in the progress of science that the doctrines set
forth by the Church must be set forth in another
sense than that in which the Church has ever re-
ceived and yet receives them."

Language such as this makes it plain that, what-
ever be the tendency in the more liberal Protestant
communions, the Roman Church has no thought of
abandoning the theories of human and cosmic origin
which it has planted itself on in times past, or en-
couraging any study which would naturally or prob-
ably lead to doubt of the authority of the Church
which has enunciated them.

Ancient and common as is this claim of Religion,
I believe it to be erroneous. It cannot stand before
thorough criticism and sound logic. Religion has
no exclusive source of information, but such sources
only as are common to all branches of human knowl-
edge. Every oracle that has ever been set up in the

43 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

Church, as the voice of the Divine, has had and still
has its human conditions and vehicles. I would not
deny the great fact of revelation, proceeding from
God, for the enlightenment of man. We come to
perceive religious truth — yes, and secular truth also,
I rejoice to believe — not merely by our own unaided
efforts, but by the help of the divine illumination
constantly vouchsafed to the earnest seeker after
truth.

But, living in the world in which we do, within
the material organisms in which our spiritual na-
tures are embodied, possessed of no other knowing
faculties than these finite ones of ours, how is it
possible for us to receive divine truth in its absolute
fullness and purity ? How can man either appre-
hend it, or interpret it, or know it as divine, without
the revelation becoming subject to those finite limi-
tations which are the conditions of human thought ?

However undoubtedly and exclusively a revela-
tion may have had its beginning with God, how can
it reach man's consciousness except through the sen-
sitive and rational avenues of the organism in which
God has set man's soul ? And these perceptive ave-
nues will inevitably give shape to the message that
passes through them. These mental windows will
tint with the color of their own glass whatever light
streams through them.

The pint pot cannot hold a quart. The earthy
soul cannot take in the spiritual conception. Love,
aspiration, self-sacrifice, divine communion — these

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 49

are but sounds without sense to the carnal mind.
Though Jehovah speak in clearest tones the law of
righteousness from Sinai's summit over the Hebrew
host, what is it to the flocks and herds ? what is it
to the mixed multitude whose mouths are watering
for the flesh-pots of Egypt ? Only so much thick
cloud round about, and the sound of thunder and
the blare of a great trumpet. Only to Aaron and
Moses comes intelligible meaning. Verbal commu-
nications, holding however lofty spiritual truth, are
but jangling noises to a man unless some correspond-
ing idea exists already in the man's mind which may
welcome the message and make plain its significa-
tion. They will either be rejected as meaningless,
or drawn down from their noble height to some
lower level on which they can be grasped.

It has been said that, if a Polynesian cannibal
was told that he ought to love his enemies, he would
answer, " Yes, we do — both roasted and broiled ! '
There are authentic anecdotes showing equally de-
graded transformations of religious conceptions when
introduced to savage minds. When Burton spoke
to the Eastern negroes about the Deity, they eagerly
asked where he was to be found, that they might kill
him, for, they said, " who but he lays waste our
homes, and kills our wives and cattle % "

" "Why did you baptize that Iroquois 1 " asked a
Huron Christian of a missionary. " If he gets to
heaven before us Hurons, he will scalp us and turn
us out."

3

50 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

The sun sends forth his radiant beams as pure
white light. The full luminous stream bathes im-
partially the whole earth. It comes to rock, to
flower, to element, absolutely the same. But with
each it becomes something quite different ; for each
untwists the woven raj, and selects from it a diverse
hue, according to its own inward affinities. The
atmosphere picks out its blue; the leaves draw
to themselves the emerald ; the iris chooses the
purple ; the buttercup paints itself with the yel-
low ; the cardinal-flower sucks its cells full of the
scarlet. So it is with the illumination that the soul
receives from the Sun of Righteousness. There is
one and the same light, but what is received from it
varies according to the capacity of the recipient.
As the largeness of soul in the man, and the gener-
ousness with which the soul's doors are opened, vary,
so do the measure of inspiration and the character
of the revelation. Each man's God takes its figure
and dimensions from the ideal of his own sense of
justice, or truth, or love. It is the image of him-
self projected on the screen of the Infinite. To sav-
age tribes, Deity is but a mightier warrior ; to over-
burdened, enervated races, the unspeakable peace
of a Nirvana ; to the oppressed and down-trodden,
he is the righteous avenger and judge ; to the ten-
der and loving, he discloses himself as the pitying,
ever-caring Father.

In coining even to the first earthly recipient,
then, revelation must take on human phases and

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 51

become subject to finite limits. And if from the
first recipient it is carried abroad over the world,
and down through generations, it must subject itself
still more to human conditions and uncertainties.
Traveling from man to man, it subjects itself to the
errors attendant on verbal or written communica-
tion. Proceeding from nation to nation, it becomes
liable to the distortions attendant on translation from
the tongue of one into that of the other. Passing
from a personal, inward feeling or thought into
the external symbols or speech that may communi-
cate to others the truth felt within, it is exposed to
the imperfections of language and to the errors of
interpretation. There is no system of speech or
written signs that can more than very inadequately
represent the delicate shadings of our mental con
ceptions. There is no arrangement of material
symbols, whether of letters or of sounds, that can
more than very coarsely image the subtile qualities
and delicate character of spiritual things. While
the Divine thought, which is the source of revela-
tion, is, of course, infallible, yet how can it find any
infallible form of words in which to clothe itself ?
And if in the past this has happened, yet, when
the usages of language change from generation to
generation so greatly and rapidly as they do, where
shall we find an infallible interpreter to tell us their
exact meaning to-day % Or, if one be found, who
shall infallibly interpret for us his explanations?
We must fall back on our own fallible understand-

52 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

ings at last, for the sense of whatever revelation or
interpretation is given to ns.

Again, how are we to know that what comes to
us claiming to be a revelation is really one ? Here,
again, the only judge is the fallible human conclu-
sion of our own reason. " It must be plain," as has
well been said, " that as far as revelation contains
any truth that asks mental assent, it must appeal to
the mental faculty. No one denies this, unless he
masks clear sense under some mental sophism." The
lofty claim made when a divine revelation is asserted
does not thereby free the claim from the possibility
of dishonesty or error, but makes it all the more im-
portant to determine whether the claim be a true
one, or the pretended revelation be only some mis-
take, or delusion, or trick of priest or lying spirit.
Were there but a single claim made of such a kind,
still, faith would not be exempt from the duty of
examination and verification. But when, as is the
case, numerous conflicting claims are made ; when
Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, each
brings forward that divine revelation, it becomes an
absolute necessity for faith to discriminate what it
deems the false revelations from what it deems the
true revelation. And, in doing this, it must take
guidance from its natural presuppositions, its own
sense of the right and the true, its own experience
of the good.

A man may suspend his reason in obedience to
the authority of a church. But, in order to come to

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 53

take such a step, he must first employ that reason to
bring him to a belief in the duty of so doing, and to
select the church that rightly, in his opinion, possesses
such a claim. John Henry Newman, it is said, de-
clares that " the true Catholic is not he who be-
lieves in the Church because it is right, but he who
submits implicitly to it without presuming to ask
such a question." Nevertheless, how can even the
Romanist have intelligently come to the decision
that he ought to surrender his reason to the Church,
unless by persuading himself that history and expe-
rience show the claim to be a reasonable one %

Either Faith adopts its authority unreasonably,
unintelligently, by the mere accident of birth, or
circumstance, or caprice, or else she must have some
reason for her choice ; must have sought, that is,
the arbitership of human understanding, and found
that approving of the claim preferred. A revelation
which would not allow of such a confirmation, by
the prepossessions of our reason, no thinking man
can accept as divine. Even the man to whom im-
mediately the knowledge of a divine truth is im-
parted could have no faith in it without such a rati-
fication of it by his own sense of truth.

Suppose, for example, that to-day a spirit de-
scended from heaven and revealed personally to us
that the Ruler and Creator of the universe is a man
of flesh and blood and stature, as ourselves, or a
six-armed, eagle-headed being, such as Hindoo idols
represent him ; or suppose this messenger from the

54 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

other world should bring us, as a message from God,
some farrago of nonsense, some plain contradiction
of our moral and religious principles, what intelli-
gent man would put the slightest faith in it ? Who
would not say that either it was an hallucination of
our sense, a deceit of some trickster, or if, indeed, a
spirit-messenger, then, a messenger from the pit, not
from the heavens.

Do you say the truth of the revelation is shown
by miracles ? Passing by the primary objection that
no outward sign can overweigh the inward sense of
truth, how can a miracle convince a man except by
appealing to his judgment and experience ? What
else is it but an argument from the analogy of hu-
man life, that every effect has a cause proportionate
to it ; that these phenomena are above that order
of things with which man is familiar, or which he
can cause ; and, therefore, as supernatural effects,
must have a supernatural cause ? And on what else
does the cogency of this argument depend than upon
a previous conviction of the veracity of God ; a con-
viction derived partly from the human intuition of
the same truth, partly from man's experience of Di-
vine goodness and faithfulness. Unless we believed
beforehand both in God's existence and in his hon-
esty and kindness, no message, no matter how mirac-
ulously authenticated, would be of such significance
as either to invite our belief or even be worthy of
much attention.

Such human conditions and necessary imperfec-

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 55

tions, in general, beset religious as all other knowl-
edge. And, in particular, we may ask, where can
faith show us any infallible oracle free from possi-
bility of mistake and human limitation ? Will the
Church furnish us with such a superior source of
knowledge ? The Church is but a congregation of
fallible men, and cannot eliminate from its sum total
what is contained in every individual part. History
shows but too conclusively how far from infallible
both Church and pope have been. In its unflatter-
ing mirror, the oracle of Rome is exhibited as con-
victed of error in scientific matters, again and again ;
compelled to retreat from position to position ;
forced to correct and recorrect its interpretations.
It is shown vacillating to and fro in regard to the
most important ecclesiastical questions ; possessed
of no clear or well-defined principles concerning
many essential theological issues ; the successive
popes refuting and overturning each other's deci-
sions ; its councils annulling the bulls of the popes,
and branding them as heretical, and its popes fulmi-
nating anathemas against its councils.1

If this be the course that consists with infalli-
bility, its advantage over fallible sources of knowl-
edge is undiscoverable.

Or will the Bible furnish us with an infallible
authority ?

Study its pages with a careful eye, and see. Does

1 See " The Pope and the Council," by Janus. Translated from
the German. Boston : Roberts Brothers. Pp. 42-62.

56 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

it claim anywhere to be absolutely, throughout its
whole extent from Genesis to Revelation, free from
error ? Nowhere.

What Paul says refers only to the Old Testa-
ment, for no gospels, and but few epistles, were
then written ; and what he asserts is that all Script-
ure is God-inspired — that is, filled with the breath
of God — not infallible. And the particular purposes
for which it is profitable he specifies. It is not for
scientific knowledge, but " for teaching, for reproof,
for correction, for discipline in righteousness, that
the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly fur-
nished unto every good work " ' (2 Timothy, iii. 16,

17).

The claim of Paul, criticism must admit. The
Scripture is filled with the ~breath of God, and profit-
able for moral and spiritual culture. In it undoubt-
edly " men of God spake as they were moved by the
Holy Spirit." But to the eye that would find in the
Bible a flawless record, exempt from human liabili-
ties, a different answer is given. Variations of style
and diversities of thought meet it. Discrepancies
of fact and inconsistencies in statement, which all
the wearisome toil and subtilties of commentators
have failed to reconcile, confront the inquirer.
What is prescribed by the law is swept away by the
prophet. What is said by them of old time is re-
pealed by the Christ. Paul shows the worthlessness

1 Translation of Geo. R. Noyes, D. D., late Hancock Professor ot
Hebrew and other Oriental Languages at Harvard University.

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 57

of works, and James the nothingness of faith with-
out them. The evangelists quote mistranslations
from the inaccurate version of the Septuagint with
more frequency than from the supposed infallible
Hebrew. The narratives of Genesis fail to agree
with the records God has written in rock and bone-
cavern, in fossil, language, and star. The list of
books considered inspired was gradually formed, and
has differed at different periods. Books now called
apocryphal were formerly a part of the canonical
Scriptures. Books formerly rejected as apocryphal
are now reckoned as a part of the divine record.
It is not improbable that in the course of time por-
tions of the present canon may be transferred to the
Apocrypha.

The text of the Scriptures is by no means free
from doubt, nor even from confessed error. As it
now stands in our received version, the existence of
no small number of erroneous readings and acknowl-
edged interpolations is a fact known to all scholars.
For an accurate test, there is no single manuscript
that we can resort to. We must rely upon the criti-
cal judgment of certain fallible men to select, out
of many codexes, the particular word which in each
passage they judge the most likely to be the origi-
nal. Surely this is not the spectacle that should be
presented by an authority "without mixture of
error."

Surrendering, then, the Church and the Bible,
may we find in the Christ an authority exceptional

58 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

and absolute ? I desire not to deny the existence of
a divine element in Jesus. I gladly recognize him as
the loftiest spiritual seer and teacher the world has
seen ; the best historic embodiment of spiritual per-
fection that we have. But we must own, if we are
clear-sighted and frank, that in Christ himself we do
not yet obtain an oracle exempt from the limitations
of humanity and the conditions of earthly knowledge.
There was in him the human as well as the divine.
" The Word was made flesh and dwelt a mongus ; ':
and through that fleshly brain and tongue it saw and
spoke what it saw, using the language of the day,
addressing itself to the conceptions and issues of the
age. Acute critics have shown clearly in the life
and teachings of Jesus the influence of the epoch
and nation that environed him. They have pointed
out in the Jewish literature, preceding and contem-
poraneous to his career, the elements of his instruc-
tion and parallels to many of his most striking say-
ings. In regard to those ideas of his which were
opposed to the prevalent ones of his times, it should
be remembered that a reaction against current ideas
is not uncommon, and as much a natural result of
them and evidence of their influence, as conformity
to them. That wonderful and incomparable flower,
whose beauty shines forth from Galilee over the
whole world, did not, nevertheless, grow suspended
in the air without contact with any thing else, but
was sprung from a Jewish root, elaborated by Jewish
nutriment, and tinted with Jewish hues. Only so

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 59

could Jesus have got into such close contact with his
age and nation as to gain the leverage whereby to
fulfill his providential mission of giving to it a mo-
tion and a revolution that should in time extend to
all quarters of the globe.

Or, lastly, may we find in the conscience of man,
in his intuitions of truth and duty, or in his instincts
of worship, an infallible oracle ? This voice within
the heart is a channel through which the Universal
Spirit most immediately breathes its inspiring influ-
ence. To each individual it is his personal oracle,
his final authority. But, to furnish us with an un-
erring source of moral or religious knowledge, with
an absolute authority, it has no claim. For whose
intuition, what man's conscience, what nation's mor-
al sense or religious instinct, shall we take as our
standard ? That of the Indian Thug, or that of the
Buddhist who thinks it a sin to kill a flea ? That of
the Feejee parricide, or that of the filial Christian ?
That of the worshiper of idols, or that of him who
worships God as a Spirit in spirit and in truth ?
Every student of history knows that the voice with-
in the heart varies its answers in every degree of
latitude and longitude ; has as many differences of
expression and detail as the individuals in whom it
whispers.

Thus, whatever authority Religion may choose,
none of them can give her absolute truth, none can
exempt her from the limitations and conditions of
human knowledge. The attempt of humanity, by

60 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

any standard-building it can perform, by any selec-
tion and exaltation of one expression of itself over
another, to free itself from its native fallibility, is
as futile as the mediaeval search for a universal sol-
vent. If any one says he possesses the universal
solvent, pray, in what sort of a vessel does he keep
it? If any one says he has an infallible oracle,
pray, by what faculty did he find it, by what
power does he now know it, comprehend it, and
transmit to others its decisions without loss of that
infallibility? A man's natural fallibility, as has
well been said, obviously cleaves to him like his
own personality, and infects every decision which
he makes.

And, as Religion must recognize that her knowl-
edge is not free from the human conditions and
characteristics which belong to Science, may not Sci-
ence not unlawfully claim for its knowledge also par-
ticipation in that same divine origin which Religion
has boasted of as its sole prerogative % Is not sci-
ence, on one side at least, from God — a missive tell-
ing of the Divine existence and character \ If we
ask the Christ, we find him from field-lily and wild-
sparrow drawing instruction as to the love and care
of the heavenly Father. If we ask of Paul, we re-
ceive as answer, " The invisible things of him from
the creation of the world are clearly seen, being un-
derstood by the things which are made, even his
eternal power and Godhead." If we ask of the
Psalmist, the response comes again : " The heavens

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 61

declare the glory of God, and the firmament show-
eth his handiwork ; day nnto day nttereth speech,
and night unto night showeth knowledge." Or, if
we look for ourselves, what do we find? These
fauna and flora which Science describes are not its
inventions. The hieroglyphics in the rocks which
it deciphers are not of its construction. Science
finds them there because they are there ; and they
are there, every monotheist must say, by the permis-
sion, by the creation of God ; for, unless we go back
to dualism or polytheism, we must recognize God
as the sole author of all things. Whatever facts or
laws exist in the world are there because such was
God's will ; whatever relations of God to Nature,
whatever aspects of the Divine government, are dis-
closed by physical investigations, are disclosed be-
cause God himself first drew the picture, and then
gave to man the eye with which to see it. As we
discern, in the manner a house is built, the character
of its builder, what sense of beauty he possesses,
what carelessness or faithfulness, what folly or wis-
dom, characterizes him, so, in the peculiarities of the
kosmic temple, we may discover the attributes of the
Great Architect. Whatever God has done, whatever
God is doing, is an expression of his nature. Every
fact, then, which Science can tell the world, every
law it can unravel, every force it can trace out, has
some divine message for man. Every natural phe-
nomenon, be it bacteria in sealed flasks, or colored
bands in a spectrum, be it building power of mole-

62 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

cule, mimicry of insects, natural selection among an-
imals (provided only it be actual fact, not guess of
man), lias something to tell us of God's thoughts,
and powers, and methods of action. All science is
thus a revelation of the Omnipresent Worker ; every
new discovery a fresh epistle from the creative Spir-
it to all the churches of knowledge. And is it rev-
erent to look on this grand unveiling of Nature's
mysteries, these sublime disclosures of infinity, eter-
nity, unity, and order, which Science has given us,
as things coming without any of that inspiration
from above which we credit to the advent of reli-
gious knowledge ? Was it so much easier a thing to
discover the laws of planetary motion than to dis-
cern the moral principles laid down in the ten com
mandments? Is it so much less noble a thing to
write the history of God's universe than the history
of the tribe of Judah ? That seems to us the most
worthy view of inspiration which limits it not to
scribes, nor prophets, nor apostles, but makes it
the light of all our seeing, the impulse of every
noble effort, the uplifting force in every spiritual
ascent. It guides the studies of a Cuvier as well
as the legislation of a Moses ; it animates the
thoughts of an Agassiz no less than the songs of a
David.

Religion, then, I say, cannot rightfully claim to
be the sole source of knowledge. She possesses no
lawful sovereignty over the realm of Science, but
stands on the same ground of experience, employs

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 63

the same human faculties, is subject to the same fal-
lible conditions, as Science, and in her divine mes-
sage receives not an exclusive privilege, but one
given likewise to her comrade. How unwise, then,
is it for her to seek to discredit Science, to endeavor
to obstruct its progress, to reject the new light phys-
ical inquiries are affording, and angrily to denounce
the new conceptions of Divine existence which they
are introducing ! Religion cannot aim a blow at Sci-
ence without wounding herself. If Religion forbids
us to trust God's own handwriting on the tablets of
Nature, how can she expect the world to accept
the revelations which have come to us in each case
through the distorting medium of human faculties ?
If Religion forbids us to trust the original docu-
ments which are open to every one's inspection,
how can she expect us to receive the record which
has descended to us down a long line of transmis-
sions, transcriptions, and translations, at the hands
of fallible men ? If Religion refuse to receive the
corrections of Science, and repulse her proffered as-
sistance, how can she escape the pitfalls of supersti-
tion, how can she rise to the intellectual heights,
where she can see the divine truths with unobstruct-
ed vision ?

For Faith, though she be the great heaven-
climber, climbs with but half-open eye, in only a
twilight light. The pure and exalted spiritual truths
which Religion enjoys to-day were by no means the

original immediate perception of an infallible faith-

#

G4 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

faculty, nor the primeval possession of a privileged
recipient, bnt they have been attained only by the
efforts of thousands of generations who have suc-
cessively " felt after God if haply they might find
him ; " and thus groping, straining their intellectual
eyes, have so refined and purged the inward sense
that the ever-present reality has become clearly
perceptible, !Not by a single bound has Religion
sprung to the mount of vision, but step by step she
has patiently toiled upward. " The glimmering
wonder of original f etichism ; the wider feeling ex-
pressed in Nature-worship, of an omnipresent secret
of power ; the higher consciousness breaking forth
in historical, prophetic religions, of the connection
between this reverence for the Supreme Majesty
and all loyalty of soul," not only has each of these
been a phase through which Religion has had to
pass, but the transition from one to the other has
been by numberless gradations ; and it has been be-
cause of the criticisms and discoveries of Science,
more than any thing else, that this ascent has been
made. It is only as the tides of wider knowledge
have worn away terrace after terrace of the alluvium
of superstition, that Religion has mounted to the
loftier and immovable rocks of fundamental truths.
It is only as physical inquiry, with iconoclastic ham-
mer, has broken idol after idol, that Faith has trans-
ferred her embrace to the purer objects, worthy of
worship. And as Religion is indebted to Science
for this progress of the past, so for the future it is

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. c.&

only by the same aid that she can expect further
advancement. Instead of toning to Science the
cold shoulder, Faith should not only welcome but
invite her cooperation.

Bti PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

CHAPTEE IV.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE TO POSSESS EXCLUSIVE KNOWL-
EDGE AND RIGHTFUL SUPREMACY. THE FAITHS OF

SCIENCE. ITS GROUNDS AND METHODS SIMILAR TO

THOSE OF RELIGION.

The time, however, lias gone by in which. Sci-
ence needs much help against Religion. At the
present day the physicists can very well take care
of themselves against the religious. The religious
world, to a considerable extent, is learning to lower
its pretensions. The old claims of the exclusive
possession of an absolute knowledge and of a right-
ful supremacy in all matters of belief are fast drop-
ping away. Science, by the most intelligent in the
religions world, is coming to be recognized, not as
a subordinate, but as an independent power ; not as
a hostile rebel, but as a friend and fellow-laborer.
But, unfortunately, as the one side is dropping its
dogmatism, the other side seems to be picking it up
and clothing itself with it. The infallibility now to
be feared is not so much that of the pontiff, who
fulminates his excommunications from the Vatican,

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 67

as that of the scientific popes, who essay, from pro-
fessors' chairs, to lay down the precise boundaries
within which Belief may now walk. The oracle
that now claims an exclusive insight and certainty,
that looks upon other avenues to truth with con-
tempt and disbelief ; that would absorb, if it could,
all other authority in its own, is not so much Reli-
gion as Science.

Look, for example, at the very word science. At
the present day it is commonly employed in refer-
ence to physical knowledge. Such an expression as
the " science of religion," or the " science of God, "
strikes us as unusual. It seems to involve a figura-
tive extension of the word beyond its proper sphere.
Yet, until a hundred or two hundred years ago, sci
ence denoted merely knowledge in general, or, in a
more special sense, systematized knowledge of any
kind. Shakespeare speaks of " music, mathematics,
and other sciences." In the middle ages, the science
par excellence — which would have been supposed to
be referred to, if the general word was used for some
particular but unspecified branch of knowledge —
was the science of theology. To express the science
of Nature, it would have been necessary to join with
it some qualifying adjunct.

The change in the use of the word indicates a
great revolution in thought. It is an interesting
historical witness to the wonderful achievements of
physical investigation, and to the lofty claims that it
makes at the present day. " I alone," modern Sci-

68 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

ence tacitly says, by the very name by which it desig-
nates itself, " I alone am scientia, real knowledge ;
all else is more or less guess-work."

And this is not merely a tacit assumption, an
unconscious arrogance, but a claim which men of
science nowadays are very fond of publicly pro-
claiming. The certainty of science is contrasted
with the uncertainty of other branches of pretended
knowledge, especially with that of religion. Sci-
ence, it is declared, is most careful in its require-
ments of proof before it gives credence, Religion
most careless. Science carefully examines Nature
and life to see what things really are, builds up its
laws by an inductive accumulation of fact upon fact,
and then demands that every generalization be ex-
perimentally verified before it is accepted as true.
Religion, on the other hand, with pious credulity
mounts any vaulting hypothesis that the Church may
order her to ride, leaps heroically upon it, up mist-
formed high-jyriori roads, toward the highest heaven,
and, as she whirls through the dizzy heights, lets
down link after link of deduction with as much con-
fidence as if the chain were fastened to some immov-
able support. Augnste Comte classes religion with
metaphysics, as but " products of the world's crude
infancy." " Science," says the great positive philoso-
pher, "conducts God with honor to its frontiers,
thanking him for his provisional services." Huxley
presents against Religion the charge that " with her
the belief in a proposition, because authority tells

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. (59

you it is true, or because you wish to believe it,
which is a high crime and misdemeanor when the
subject-matter of reason is of one kind, becomes un-
der the alias of faith the greatest of all virtues when
the subject-matter of reason is of another kind ; "
and he would enforce upon us the wise advice, as he
calls it, of Hume : " If we take in hand any volume
of divinity or school metaphysic for instance, let us
ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concern-
ing quantity or number? No. Does it contain any
experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact
and existence ? Xo. Commit it, then, to the flames,
for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

Such are the charges currently made nowadays
against the trustworthiness of the truths of reli-
gion ; such are the unfavorable comparisons made
against its methods and results as compared with
those of science. JSTot a few men of eminent repu-
tation in physical investigation have lent themselves
to it. More of lesser knowledge have loudly exulted
in it ; and many and many who have got some little
smattering of modern science have thought to show
their superior enlightenment by most extreme charges
against the validity of religious knowledge.

Now, I would freely admit that there has been
and still is, among what has been currently accepted
as religious truth, a great deal that has not been so
certain as it should be. Theology has advanced ex-
aggerated claims to absolute knowledge. It has in-
dulged in most groundless hypotheses. It has made

70 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

most unwarranted assumptions about the plans and
counsels and inmost nature of the Godhead, and
about the details of the future life, and about scores
of other things entirely beyond human power to
know. Creeds have laid down dogmas about human
nature and Scriptural inspiration, the authority of
prophets and apostles, the work and deeds and na-
ture of Christ, that have shown themselves plainly
contradictory to observation and experience, to rea-
son and the moral sense.

Mediaeval scholasticism especially sinned griev-
ously in these respects. It delighted in hair-splitting
disputations over frivolous puzzles and in endless
speculations about things not only transcending the
possibility of human knowledge, but destitute of any
practical moment. Its only criterion of truth was
the deliverances of the Church or the almost equally
venerated Aristotle. When Bacon turned the hu-
man mind to the pursuit of the useful and the study
of natural things, and enjoined the method of in-
duction and the test of verification, knowledge made
amazing conquests. The human atom, looking forth
from his petty pellet of planetary matter, has meas-
ured and weighed the celestial bodies, traced their
orbits through the heavens, divined the processes by
which they grew from dusty nebulae into glowing
sun or life-blessed planet ; he has tracked the subtile
Proteus, Force, from form to form, and made it now
fly with his messages and then drag him on his er-
rands, and spin, and knit, and reap, and sew for him.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 71

It is Dot strange, therefore, that physical science
should have grown somewhat conceited, and ima-
gined that its pet methods and its own narrow circle
of work were alone compatible with any solid attain-
ment.

And the religions world for the most part has
unwittingly confirmed this assumption. Finding
the researches of modern science in geology, as-
tronomy, ethnology, and so on, bringing up for-
midable objections to current religious doctrines,
instead of saying, " Eeligion knows only the truth :
if the received doctrines are shown to be inconsist-
ent with anv fact, let them be revised" — instead of
thus honestly acknowledging the possibility of some
past errors, and removing from religion the bur-
den of sustaining portions found to be erroneous or
doubtful, the religious world, for the most part, has
clung to the most incredible parts as if they were its
most essential elements ; and it has sought to justify
them by declaring that the unconverted reason is
incapable of comprehending the high mysteries of
religion. Religious truth (theologians and preach-
ers, defending the old beliefs, have maintained) be-
longs to another realm from ordinary kinds of truth.
It is not to be tried by the understanding. It is not
to be brought to the bar of common-sense — but it is
to be discerned by the inner soul, and its evidence
found in the soul's satisfaction in it. By this view,
which has been advocated and defended by such men
as Hamilton, Mansel, Baclen Powell, and Faraday,

72 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

the field of truth is divided into two separate por-
tions: one, the province of knowledge, where sci-
ence holds sway ; the other, the province of belief,
where Religion has her throne. The two, however
opposite they appear, can never, it is declared, really
interfere or trouble each other. Science may estab-
lish that, scientifically, the sloth, and the humming-
bird, and the kangaroo, and a thousand other species
of living creatures, could not have come from Aus-
tralia, and South America, and Greenland, across
seas and icy deserts, to take shelter in Noah's ark.
Scientifically, then, it is not to be credited — that is
all. But, as a matter of religion, it is none the less
to be accepted. It only requires more of that faith
without sight by which the believer should walk.

Xow, by taking this mode of defending itself
against the incursions of modern science, the Church
has aided much in spreading suspicion of the cer-
tainty of its cherished doctrines. When its own
advocates would make a believer's mind like those
vessels that are built with water-tight compartments,
one-half of it for the play of common-sense, the
other for the dwelling-place of faith, such trouble-
some things as reason and observation being securely
locked out when the soul is at its devotions, or con-
sidering its creed — it is exceedingly likely that those
practically inclined should judge this realm of faith
*o be not a realm of fact, but of fancy. Bishops like
he of London may exhort the modern inquirer as
eloquently as they please to throw away doubt as

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 73

they would a bomb-shell : but it serves only to make
the investigator more suspicious of the validity of
religion. lie beholds science challenging for itself
full and searching scrutiny, but his spiritual guides
hiding away religious truth as much as possible from
his inspection. He sees science becoming more firm-
ly established the more vigorously it is criticised.
He beholds Theology, meantime, grudgingly and un-
graciously, but continuously, yielding up, before the
steady advance of scientific investigation, one after
another long-cherished dogma. The entire circle of
religious truth falls under doubt. That which is
declared to be beyond the depth of reason he sus-
pects is only a turbid shallow of superstition ; and
this faith, which is not knowledge, will never do for
practical men who seek realities. The only thing
which seems to the modern inquirer entirely worthy
of confidence is science, and to that he looks, in min-
gled fear and hope, to see what loved belief it shall
next sweep away, or wdiat modicum of religion, if
any, it shall discover at last a scientific justification
for.

JSTow, if it be the fact that knowledge is only to
be found within the special circle and by the special
methods of physical science, if religion has nothing
equally certain to show, then, it seems to me, the
fate of religion, among all educated men, is already
sealed ; and the wise will seek as soon as possible,
in museums and scientific institutions, the only
Teacher who can declare abiding, trustworthy truth.
4

74 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

And, moreover, as long as there prevails the current,
unrelated susjncion that it is so — as long as the re-
ligious world sanctions expressly or implicitly the
idea that theology requires, to use Huxley's phrase,
"a different measure and a different weight from
science," it will be impossible for it to disarm the
hostility of scientific minds, it will be impossible for
it to maintain its foothold in society against the
steady crowding out which physical discoveries are
constantly exercising upon it. If the religious do-
main in the modern mind is not to become such a do-
main as Strauss charges that it already is, " a domain
resembling that of the red Indians in America, re-
duced to constantly narrower limits by their white
neighbors," it must be shown that, in its essential
elements, it possesses certainty, not absolute certain-
ty— for we are learning that for man there is little
or no absolute certainty — but the same kind and
measure of certainty as men act upon in trade and

daily life, and especially accept unhesitatingly in sci-
ence.

In the last century Bishop Butler wrote a fa-
mous argument in which he showed the analogy of
religion to the course of Nature, and that the same
sort of difficulties that are found in it are found also
in the constitution of Nature. It presented strongly
the inconsistency of those who, accepting Nature as
the work of a wise and good God, halt before the
difficulties which they descry in the course of reve-
lation. But that argument, well put as it was, has

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 75

lost its effectiveness against the doubters of religion
to-day. For its corner-stone, the doubter's belief in
Divine Creation, is just the thing now called in ques-
tion ; and the exhibition of difficulties in Divine Cre-
ation similar to those in revelation, instead of lead-
ing the inquirer to accept both, rather inclines him
to throw them both overboard. The method of that
argument, however, has always seemed to us a good
one, provided only some corner-stone which the
doubter thoroughly accepted as solid could be found
from which to start the reductio ad absurdum.

Now this corner-stone seems to be furnished at
the present day by physical science. It is, as we
have just noticed, the oracle of almost every reli-
gious doubter, the arsenal from which he draws most
of the arrows he casts against religion, the rival for
the suffrages of belief with which religion is unfa-
vorably contrasted — the substitute, in fine, which his
instincts of reverence and worship put in the place
of God and constitute his Divinity. Now, if it can
be shown that the same difficulties attend this un-
questioned science as attend religion, and that reli-
gion, whether or not it has absolute proof, yet has
just as good proof as that which in physical matters
all accept, the doubter, it seems to me, will have lit-
tle ground left to stand upon, and the practical trust-
worthiness of religion will be shown.

Now this, I believe, can be shown. Knowledge
is not a special privilege of natural science. The
proofs and evidences of religion are just as valid.

76 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE

For most of them are strikingly similar, not a few
identical. The grounds, and methods, and results
of spiritual knowledge are, in the main, either the
same or closely analogous to those of accepted physi-
cal truths. The common charges made against reli-
gion are applicable also against contemporary science.
Science cannot discredit religion without invalidating
its own work; and those who unhesitatingly accept
all the deliverances of physical investigation ought
logically to accord the same belief to the similar
proofs which Religion presents of her main theses.

This similarity between religious and physical
knowledge is what I aim to set forth in the next
few chapters. The subject divides itself into two
great divisions : I. A comparison of the grounds
and methods of science with those of religion ; II. A
comparison of the objects aimed at and the results
reached by the two.

I. The grounds and methods of science compared
with those of religion.

The means of gaining knowledge are various.
There is —

1. Personal observation and experience furnished
by the senses. This may be either (a) original ; or
(b) in verification of something already discovered,
testified to, expected, or predicted.

2. Intuition. This comprehends (a) immediate
cognition of consciousness or direct mental percep-
tions, and (b), corresponding to these, constitutional
convictions universal and necessary among the bulk

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 77

of mankind — convictions suggested and developed
by experience, but before personal experience exist-
ing as native predispositions, moulding and making
possible experience, and, when developed, extending
their affirmations beyond the limits of all experience.

3. Testimony. This may be either (a) in witness
of a fact, that is, evidence, or (ft) in the shape of an
opinion or judgment of some one presumed to know ;
that is, authority.

4. Inference, by which these various data are
worked up. This may be either (a) deductive, that
is, reasoning from the general to the particular ; or
(ft) inductive, reasoning from one quality in many to
the same in all ; or (c) analogical, reasoning from sim-
ilar qualities in one to the accompanying qualities
in the same.

Again, inference may be either (d) demonstra-
tive, reaching certitude ; or (e) probable, approximat-
ing more or less to certitude, reaching at one end of
the scale moral certainty, at the other amounting
simply to a theory or hypothesis.

Now, it is a prevalent notion, especially among
those who unfavorably contrast the methods of reli-
gion with those of science, that of these various
methods, science uses almost entirely the following
four : sense-observation, induction, deduction of ex-
perimental tests, and verification ; and has little or
nothing to do with the opposite methods : intuitive
cognition and belief, evidence, authority, analogy,
and other kinds of merely probable inference. Re-

78 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

ligion, on the contrary, it is charged, neglects almost
entirely the first set of methods, and trusts herself
unwarrantably to the last.

Huxley, for example, in his lecture upon the
" Educational Value of the Study of Natural Histo-
ry," ' states what he says is the method of all science,
and it consists of simply the four steps just men-
tioned. Newton declared that hypotheses are not
to be regarded in experimental philosophy, but only
observations and inductions. Prof. Tait says : " Nat-
ural philosophy is an experimental science. No
a priori reasoning can conduct us demonstratively
to a single physical truth." Comte will not allow
introspection as a source of valid knowledge. " Pos-
itive philosophy," according to him, " knows only
sense-observation and the various inductions and de-
ductions that may be made from it" Hippolyte
Taine says, in reference to the general ideas which
correspond to real qualities, that "they are the ob-
ject of the experimental sciences, and their connec-
tions are discovered by the inductive road." Lewes
similarly condemns intuition as having " no such
safeguard " as sense has. " The method of verifica-
tion, let us never forget," he says, " is the one grand
characteristic distinguishing science from philoso-
phy, modern inquiry from ancient inquiry. . . . The
proof is with us the great object of solicitude. We
demand certainty ; and as the course of human evo-

1 " Lay Sermons," p. 83.
* " On Intelligence," p. 409.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 79

lution shows certainty to be attainable on no other
method than the one followed by science, the con-
demnation of metaphysics is inevitable." : And
Prof. Tyndall, in his answer, in the Contemporary
Review, to the critics of his prayer-gange sugges-
tion, after acknowledging that the theory of an
over-ruling God who answers prayer is a legitimate
theory, says, " but, without verification, a theoretic
conception is a mere figment of the intellect."

Now, no such division or contrast in the meth-
ods of science and religion exists, I believe. If they
be taken up successively, it will be seen, I think,
that science, on the one hand, employs intuitive cog-
nition and belief, authority and evidence, analogies,
hypotheses, and various probable inferences, as well
as religion ; and, on the other hand, that religion,
like science, grounds itself on observation, induction,
and experimental verification. In short, science has
its faith-basis, and faith its scientific foundation.

I. Let us consider first the faith-basis of science.
Take, to begin with, intuition. Here has always
been one of the chief bulwarks of religion. It is
from the immediate cognition of consciousness that
religion affirms that it derives those spiritual phe-
nomena, personality, free-will, devotional sensibility,
and aspiration, and those great ideas, right and wrong,
duty, responsibility, infinity, perfection, divinity,

1 "Biographical History of Philosophy," pp. xxix., xxx., Intro-
duction. In his "Problems of Life and Mind," passim, the same
thing is said again and again.

80 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

which constitute its foundations. And it is to the
native convictions, universal in humanity, of a great
Superhuman Spirit, and of a longer life for the hu-
man soul than its life in the flesh — convictions at
first perhaps dim and vague, possibly mere predis-
positions to this view rather than that, but with ex-
perience and intellectual development becoming
clearer and more elevated — that religion refers as
among the strongest proofs of its truth.

Men of science, however, as we have already no-
ticed, have entertained the greatest hostility to and
scorn of intuition ; and have made it one of their
chief objections to theology that it trusts so confid-
ingly to it. Nevertheless, intuitive cognition and
conviction is the only ground upon which science
can rest a large part of its own fundamental doc-
trines. Science, for example, accepts as the most
trustworthy of all its departments the science of
geometry. The truths established by it are indis-
pensable to astronomy and to much of mechanics
and physics. Yet, how is the truth of the funda-
mental axioms of geometry known % By sense-ob-
servation ? No skill and care would ever enable us
to learn or prove experimentally any one geometrical
proposition in the absolute way in which we know
them all. Any finite amount of difference vastly
less than what the sense could discern would falsify
them. Yet the most delicately measured and con-
structed figures are but rude approximations. They
may seem equal where they are unequal, and regu-

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 81

lar where they are irregular. In fact, there are in
Kature no unextencled points, no breacithless lines,
no even planes, no exact circles and spheres, such as
geometry deals with. Our diagrams might suggest
such truths as that the sum of the angles of a trian-
gle are equal to two right angles, and that the square
on the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares
on the other two sides. But they never could make
it absolutely certain. Our exact and absolute knowl-
edge of these truths is known, just as the axioms of
morality are, by the mind's eye, by the direct inner
apprehension.

Or in any of the physical sciences, take up any
so-called simple fact of. observation, and see how, in-
stead of the observer and his fact standing in direct
relation, there is a perfect chain of successive intui-
tions between them.

A botanist, for example, relates to a scientific
society that he saw last week the phenomenon of a
perfectly green rose. But how, Mr. Botanist, do
you know that you really observed such a thing 1
You saw it, you say, with your own eyes. But how
do you know your eyes are to be trusted ? Perhaps
you say that you smelt it or felt it, also. Still, let
all the senses testify to it, how do you know they
do not all deceive you ? It is possible. The best
observer may make mistakes.1 Every sense is liable

1 Astronomers have long recognized, under " allowance for per-
sonal equation," a certain inexactness in the observations of the best
observers.

£2 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

to erroneous suggestion.1 Every morning we wake
from a crowd of fallacious perceptions, and our open-
eyed moments are but waking dreams. Taine calls
perception, in his work on "Intelligence," "essen-
tially hallucination," so liable does he show it to be
to deception, and so constantly does it refer sensa-
tions to localities of the body where they do not
really exist.3

1 Either an excitement of the nervous centre by hasheesh, opium,
alcohol, or some intense idea, or an irritation of the nerve by con-
cussion or local inflammation, is sufficient, as repeated experiments
and observations have shown, to excite illusions of the senses. Such
volumes as Maury's "Annales Medico-Psychologiques," Baillarger's
" Des Hallucinations," Griesinger's " Traite des Malades Mentales,"
Abercrombie's " Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers," or
any standard " Pathology " or " Physiology " will illustrate this point.

2 Taine, in Part II., Book I., Chapter I. of his " On Intelligence,"
shows by numerous instances cited from medical authorities, that
while we assign every sensation which we experience to a certain
place in our sensory members, foot, hand, tongue, etc., this is but an
illusion. When a foot has been amputated, tinglings will be felt for
many years, as if in the foot no longer there. Disease in the marrow
excites tinglings in the extremities. When a new nose is formed
by turning down a flap of skin from the forehead, and the nose is
touched, it still seems for a long time to be the forehead that is
touched. The sensation, though usually excited by some external
object, may be excited by some molecular disturbance in the nerve,
or by an image in the cerebral lobe. The affirmative judgment,
or mental perception, none the less follows. We call it then a case
of hallucination. But as in all cases the presence of this internal
sensation is the immediate antecedent — as it is this internal phan-
tom which is taken for an external object — all perceptions are
really hallucinations. " Thus external perception," he says, " is an
internal dream. . . . The hallucination which seems a monstrosity is
the very fabric of our mental life."

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. S3

" Of course," says the botanist, " I am liable to
mistake a false perception for a true one, but what-
ever is really perceived is infallible evidence for its
own truth." But what is " really perceived ? ' When
the actual observation is rigorously analyzed we find
that what is actually observed is not any external
thing, but certain inward states of consciousness
which we call sensations — sensations of color, smell,
tonch, etc. As Mill,1 and Bain, and Taine, have
shown in the field of philosophy, and Huxley, and
Spencer, and Helmholtz, have reaffirmed as repre-
sentatives of science, all that we really know of any

1 John Stuart Mill, in his " Examination of Sir William Hamil-
ton," Chapter XI., defines matter as a " permanent possibility of sen-
sation," and will not believe in matter in any other sense. " I do
not believe," he says, " that the real externality to us of any thing,
except other minds, is capable of proof."

Prof. Helmholtz, in " The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vi-
sion," says : " What we directly apprehend is not the immediate action
of the external exciting cause upon the ends of our nerves, but only
the changed condition of the nervous fibres, which we call the state
of excitation or functional activity."

Prof. Huxley, in his address on Descartes, " Lay Sermons,"
p. 340, says, emphatically : " Matter and force are, so far as we can
know, mere names for certain forms of consciousness. . . . Thus it
is an indisputable truth that, what we call the material world, is only
known to us under the forms of the ideal world."

Herbert Spencer, " Principles of Psychology," p. 206, says, after
an extended review of the relativity of feelings : " Thus we are
brought to the conclusion that what we are conscious of as proper-
ties of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, are but sub-
jective affections produced by objective agencies that are unknown
and unknowable."

84 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

object is nothing more nor less than our knowledge
of certain forms of our own consciousness. There
is no observation, strictly speaking, of any external
object. We must either say, with Prof. Bain and
his school, that " the belief in the existence of any
portion of matter outside and independent of our
consciousness is a most anomalous fiction," or else
we must rest for its truth on an intuitive conviction
of the veracity of the senses and the existence of an
external world such as would give rise within us to
our felt states of consciousness.

Again, you say that you saw the rose last week.
Still more intuitive beliefs must you, then, lean
upon. For, how can you testify with certainty to
what occurred last week ? You have no present sen-
sation such as you describe. You have only in your
present consciousness an image or recollection of it,
and how do you know that this present image is a
truthful copy of the past sensation? There is no
reason for it except that intuitive conviction of the
veracity of memory which John Stuart Mill himself
is forced to acknowledge as an "ultimate belief."1
Xo past experience can prove this trustworthiness
of memory. For it must in each case be taken for
granted before you can have any cognizance what-
ever of your past experience.

But still another intuition belongs to the chain.
YTou said that it was you who observed the rose last

1 Mill's "Examination of Hamilton," p. 216, vol. i., American
edition.

THE CLAIM OF SCIEXCE. 85

week. You remember it as an experience of your-
self, and you imply, and the worth of your testimony
depends upon the fact, that you who a week ago had
a certain sensation, and now have it not, are yet one
and the self -same person. Now, how do you know
this personal identity ? Again, you must admit you
know it only by an intuitive conviction.

Thus, to be able to trust the simplest past obser-
vation of a natural object, we must accept these four
intuitive beliefs : 1. In the veracity of the senses ;
2. In the reality of an external world; 3. In the
veracity of memory ; 4. In our continuing personal
identity.

Among the fundamental principles on which sci-
ence depends are the three doctrines of the inde-
structibility of matter, the continuity of motion, and
the persistence of force. Were it possible for mat-
ter to become non-existent, or for motion or force to
lapse into nothing, there would exist in science incal-
culable elements, fatal to all positive knowledge or
scientific interpretation of phenomena. What war-
rant have we, then, for the truth of these great prin-
ciples? Inductive experiment? This has certainly
contributed much to establish it. Delicate tests with
balance and retort have shown that when matter,
motion, or force, seemed to disappear, they simply
changed their form, place, or direction. Solids
changed to gases, molar motion to molecular mo-
tion, force of heat passed into magnetic or chemical
force. Track the cunning Proteus into his new

86 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

haunt, and you will find him there undiminished in
quantity. This is what experience has suggested
and approximately proved. But it has only done so
approximately, never absolutely. It has shown that
the more delicate were its means of measurement,
the more closely it could follow every diverging
motion or escaping matter, the more nearly equiva-
lent was the quantity accounted for at the end with
that with which the experiment began. But it has
never proved this with any absolute exactness, nor for
any larger field than the narrow circles which have
been specially investigated.1 Moreover, all through
the so-called process of inductive proof, the truth to
be demonstrated has been continually assumed, as
Herbert Spencer has admirably shown in the fourth,
fifth, and sixth chapters of his " First Principles."
Whatever inductive experiments are made depend
for their validity upon the continual assumption that
the gravitation of the weights, or whatever unit of
force is taken as the measure, remains constant, and
of this, says Herbert Spencer (p. 187), no proof is
assigned, nor can be assigned. " Kor is it only in
their concrete data," he continues, " that the reason-
ings of terrestrial and celestial physics assume the
persistence of force. They equally assume it in the

1 Prof. Joseph Lovering, in his address as president, before the
American Association at Hartford, 1874, says of the doctrine of the
conservation of energy : " The most that physical science can assert
is, that it possesses no evidence of the destructibility of matter or
force." See also Lewes's " Problems of Life and Mind," vol. ii., p.
262.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 87

abstract principle with which they set out, and which
they repeat in justification of every step. The equal-
ity of action and reaction is taken for granted from
beginning to end of the argument ; and to assert
that action and reaction are equal and opposite, is to
assert that force is persistent. . . . Clearly, then, the
persistence of force is an ultimate truth of which no
inductive proof is possible."

Or take the other great basic principle of sci-
ence— the uniformity of Nature, embracing in that
term both the uniformities of coexistence, or accom-
panying qualities of things, and the uniformities of
succession, or, as Mill calls it, the universality of
causation. The validity of all induction, of all rea-
sonings as to matter of fact in past, present, or fu-
ture, depends upon the assumption of this uniform-
ity of Nature. What scientific foundation, then,
does science present for this universal basis of its
knowledge ? It has none. John Stuart Mill, to be
sure, sought to rest this general basis of induction
upon induction itself, even upon an induction by
simple enumeration.1 But all his logical skill could
not cover up the fact that he was thus proving the
universal by a limited number of particulars, the
greater by the less, the stronger by the weaker. It
hardly needs to be pointed out that any particular
experience, short of universal extent, cannot prove

1 " I hold it to be itself an instance of induction, and induction by
no means of the most obvious kind." — (" Logic," Book III., Chapter
HI, § 1.)

88 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

a universal law. However the evidence be manipu-
lated, a general and absolute conclusion cannot be
established upon a limited and uncertain premise.
Experience can only testify as to what has been, not
as to what will be. It can testify to what has come
within its field, not as to what is outside. Although
two events have accompanied each other a hundred
thousand times under our observation, that is no
proof that they will do so the next time. It is pos-
sible that they may not. As one whose predispo-
sitions all lead the other way says, "Water has
quenched our thirst in the past ; by what assump-
tion do we affirm that the same will happen in the
future ? Experience does not teach this ; experience
is only of what has actually been ; and, after never
so many repetitions of a thing, there still remains
the peril of venturing upon the untrodden land of
future possibility. The fact, generally expressed as
Nature's uniformity, is the guarantee, the ultimate
major premise of all induction. ' What has been will
be,' justifies the inference that water will assuage
thirst in after-times. We can give no reason, no
evidence, for this uniformity ; and therefore the
course seems to be to adopt this as the finishing pos-
tulate."—(Bain's "Logic," I., 273.)

This is, indeed, the only logical course, to admit
the belief in the uniformity of Nature as a funda-
mental postulate, a primary intuition, an ultimate
law of the mind. As Bain says in another work
("Emotions and Will," second edition, page 537),

THE CLAIM OF SCIEXCE. 89

" The foremost rank among the inductive tenden-
cies involved in belief is to be assigned to the natu-
ral trust that we have in the continuance of the
present state of things." This natural trust is not,
as Mr. Mill would have us believe, a mere generali-
zation from experience. Experience may confirm it,
but it exists before experience. It is what makes
experience possible in the first place, and afterward
shows it to be applicable.

But it may be said that, though there is some-
thing in this natural trust, this intuitive belief, that
precedes the experience of the individual, it does not
precede the experience of the race ; that it is, in fact,
simply the experience of our ancestors, organized
within us. This is what Herbert Spencer and Lewes
urge. But, should this be established or admitted, it
would give no sufficient explanation to our present
question. The question here is, not about the origin
of our belief, but about its logical validity. Grant
that the experience which testifies is not merely that
of the individual, but that of the whole human race
from its creation, or, if you please, that of the still
longer line of man's ancestry from the lowest living
creature up to the humanity of to-day, this is still
far from sufficient to afford logical validity to belief
in universal uniformitv. After even this extension
back through all past generations is given to experi-
ence, the portion of time and space which it can bear
witness to is but a little corner in the great field of
Nature, and the induction of the premise still falls

90 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KXOWLEDGE.

immensely short of the universality which the con-
clusion demands. Unless Science acknowledges that
its fundamental principle has no logical justification,
it must rest it on the intuitive conviction or natural
faith of men in it, and recognize such natural faith
as an ultimate foundation, sufficient as its own evi-
dence, allowing nothing lower and needing nothing
stronger beneath.1

2. Authority and evidence. Every religion leans
upon these more or less. Every religion has its
founder, prophet, or teacher, whose word it rev-
erences. Before the disciple sees the truth of his
master's teaching by his own mental sight or life-
experience, he accepts it as true ; presuming that it
is true because he recognizes in his master a knowl-
edge and a nature superior to his own. The precious
utterances of such masters are collected in books,
which soon become sacred. Some Holy Scripture,
Bible, Koran, or Yeda, is an heirloom in every form
of faith. Then comes the need of evidence to prove

1 The following passage from Huxley's address on Descartes's "Dis-
course," " Lay Sermons," p. 327, might be quoted in confirmation of
the points so far made : " Strictly speaking, the existence of a ' self
and of a ' not-self are hypotheses by which we account for the facts
of consciousness. They stand upon the same footing as the belief in
the general trustworthiness of memory and in the general constancy
of the order of Nature, as hypothetical assumptions which cannot be
proved or known with the highest degree of certainty which is given
by immediate consciousness." Although we should prefer the name
41 intuitive beliefs " to " hypothetical assumptions," yet the argu-
ment for the faith-basis of science is the same.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 91

the important questions of its authenticity and gen-
uineness. The longer a form of faith endures, and
the farther away it gets from its original fountain,
the larger pl&ce in it do these two elements natural-
ly take. In Christianity, especially, great stress has
been laid upon them. With many it has been an
undue stress, that neglected the internal evidence
that would still remain for Christianity though all
external evidence were swept away. Nevertheless,
there is a natural and proper place for authority and
evidence among the proofs of the Christian religion.
And in science, too, there is a similar need and
use of these two media of proof and personal con-
viction. All beginners in science, and the great
mass of common people, have to lean upon scien-
tific authorities.1 Some few scientific facts and laws
they can observe or form for themselves. But for
all the more difficult matter they must trust some
one or ones whom they believe to possess competent
knowledge. For example, even such a universally-
believed fact as the revolution of the earth around
the sun — there is not one man in ten thousand who
has mastered personally the proof of it, or who is
able to demonstrate it to any man wrho should de-

1 " Authority is the evidence on which the mass of mankind be-
lieve every thing which they are said to know, except facts of which
their own senses have taken cognizance. It is the evidence on which
even the wisest receive all those truths of science or facts in history
or in life, of which they have not personally examined the proofs." —
(John Stuart Mill, "Three Essays on Religion," p. 18. See also
Le Conte, "Religion and Science," p. 236.)

92 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

elare himself a believer in the old Ptolemaic system.
The other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-
nine accept it as a fact through their faith in a few
astronomers' assertions.

Prof. Henfrey, in his paper upon the " Study
of Botany," 1 takes pains to deny that it is in-
-dispensable for every prosecutor of natural history
to verify or repeat the propositions of the abstract
science ; " in fact," he says, " the enunciation and
demonstration of them, which form the great busi-
ness of the philosophical botanist, would scarcely
come within the space of possibility for the gener-
ality of mankind busied with other matters." This
is equally true of almost every other branch of sci-
ence. If the student of physical knowledge should
accept nothing on authority, he would spend his life
in retracing a few hand-breadths of early investiga-
tion. Progress is made in science, as everywhere
else, by accepting in faith the results of the past,
and making them a platform on which to mount
higher. ]Sot only scientific pupils must do this, but
all beneath the very great masters ; and even these
greatest masters must do so outside of their own
specialties. Even among those who stand high in
scientific fame, how many, for instance, who accept
and use the results of Laplace's " Mecanique Ce-
leste," Faraday's electrical discoveries, Champoll ion's
and Bunsen's Egyptian discoveries, Rawlinson's and
Oppert's decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions,

1 Youmans's " Culture demanded by Modern Life," p. 105.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 93

or William Thomson's measurement of the size of
molecules, have ever themselves followed through
and verified the steps by which those results were
reached ?

Xor can science progress without a similar trust
in and use of evidence. In chemistry, to be sure,
most facts can be verified at any time by experiment.
But even here it is not more than once or twice
that a chemist will evaporate forty tons of mineral
water, as Prof. Bunsen did, to show in it a little
csesium. Chemists, for the most part, are content
to take Bunsen's testimony for it. In astronomy,
the eternal stars generally allow instant verification
of observation at any time. But for transient and
exceptional facts, the testimony of a few, perhaps of
a single observer, has to be relied upon. And it is
relied upon, though the facts often are in apparent
contradiction to the usual order of Nature. When
Tycho Brahe relates that he one night saw a star
flash forth in great brilliancy in the constellation of
Cassiopeia ; or Prof. Young describes immense erup-
tions upon the surface of the sun as witnessed by
him ; or some other observer at a remote point of
the earth tells of an eclipse seen only there, science
confidently accepts their evidence. So, for the dates
of ancient eclipses and planetary conjunctions, the
occurrence of meteoric showers and the appearances
of comets in former times, astronomers rely upon an-
cient records whose authenticity and genuineness are,
to say the least, no more sure than those of the first

94 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

three gospels or the Pauline Epistles. This method
of comparing present observations with former ones
is a frequent one with astronomers, and their main
resource in determining exactly the length of the day,
the year, and other natural constants. Hipparchus
made the first clear application of it, it is said, when
he compared his own observations with those of Aris-
tarchus, made one hundred and forty -five years pre-
viously. Laplace, in explaining the long inequality
in the motions of Jupiter and Saturn, was much as-
sisted by a conjunction of these planets observed by
Ibyn Jounis, at Cairo, toward the close of the elev-
enth century. Poisson, by making use of an ancient
eclipse recorded by the Chaldeans, was supposed to
have proved that the sidereal day had not altered
one ten-millionth part in twenty-five hundred years.
Similar calculations were made by Laplace. It is
now concluded, however, that the sidereal day is
longer by one part in two million seven hundred
thousand than in 720 b. c. All these calculations,
of course, assume the trustworthiness of ancient
records.

In geology, botany, zoology, also, the man who
will believe nothing but what he has seen with his
own eyes will learn very little. Xo one observer
can personally observe a thousandth part of the phe-
nomena which constitute the accepted stock of scien-
tific knowledge. At most, he can but scan a hortus
siccus, or museums of minerals, shells, skeletons, and
stuffed specimens. For the original locality and po-

THE CLAIM OF SCIEXCE. 95

sition of strata, for the living appearance, habits, and
homes of the various species, and for the whole ac-
count of the fauna and flora of remote countries not
yet illustrated by accessible specimens, the man of
science must depend upon the reports of travelers,
often no more in number than, nor so close in agree-
ment as, the Four Evangelists. They bring back
reports of glass sponges, and animals with eyes
brought up from the rayless and plantless depths of
the sea, as in the recent dredging expeditions. They
give us accounts of fossil horses, no bigger than a fox ;
of veritable dragons, the winged-fingered pterodac-
tyles, twenty-five feet from tip to tip ; of birds with
well-developed teeth in both jaws, and of fish with
legs ; of sea-serpents, the sauroid reptiles of the Cre-
taceous period, over seventy feet in length — as Prof.
Marsh's expeditions have done. They tell us of a
race of dwarfs and other marvels, as Schweinfurth
has done ; they recount every day new wonder after
wonder, just as much opposed to general experience
as any thing in the doctrines and accounts of Chris-
tianity, and the scientific world receives their narra-
tives with full credence. Certainly, scientific men
should be the last to refuse as credible the testimony
of honest eye-witnesses simply because their narra-
tives contain some marvelous details.

3. Analogy, hypothesis, and various kinds of
merely probable inference.

Keligion, it is true, often uses these in support
of the doctrines it advances. It employs the argu-

96 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

ment from analogy, for example, in proof of the fu
ture life of the soul. Every atom of matter, it says
is believed by Science to be absolutely indestructi-
ble. So also is every smallest quantity of force. If
these other units, if all the rest of the force in the
universe is thus able to survive the shocks of change,
if all else is thus carefully guarded by Nature from
destruction, is it likely that the intelligent soul, the
conscious unit, the spiritual force which is the most
exalted of all earthly things, perishes at the end of
this short life ?

Again, every order of organized sentient being
below man has a sphere of development and action
commensurate with its capacities. Unless man be
a solitary exception to the general order, he must
also have such a sphere. But it is evident that in
this hand-breadth of earth and earthly life his vast
capacities and desires cannot fulfill themselves. If
his chances of development are like those of his
fellow-creatures, he must have an existence here-
after to give the opportunities not supplied here.

jSTow, whether these analogies be considered as
supplying logical proof or not, they are just such as
Science uses.

Science asserts with entire confidence the exist-
ence of this and that chemical element in the heav-
enly bodies, iron and sodium in the atmosphere of
the sun, Sirius, and other stars ; blazing hydrogen
gas in the dumb-bell nebula and other irresolvable
nebulse. How does it know any one of these facts,

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 97

say the last ? Simply by the fact that objects on the
earth presenting the same spectroscopic lines are
hydrogen. As the nebula presents these lines, it is
inferred to be of the same constitution in other re-
spects also. It is by a like analogical argument that
the white spots at the poles of Mars are believed by
scientific men to be snow, that the fossil skeletons
found in the earth are held to have once belonged to
living animals, and that the likenesses of composition
and growth which language and geological strata
exhibit, teach us their history and origin.1

1 In Dr. W. B. Carpenter's " Inaugural Address before the British
Association for the Advancement of Science," at Brighton, 1872,
I have, since writing the above, found the following confirmatory pas-
sage : " Mr. Lockyer speaks as confidently of the sun's chromosphere,
of incandescent hydrogen, and of the local outbursts which cause it
to send forth projections tens of thousands of miles high, as if he
had been able to capture a flask of this gas, and had generated water
by causing it to unite with oxygen. Yet this confidence is entirely
based on the assumption that a certain line which is seen in the
spectrum of a hydrogen-flame, means hydrogen also when seen in the
spectrum of the sun's chromosphere ; and high as is the probability
of that assumption, it cannot be regarded as a demonstrated certain- *
ty, since it is by no means inconceivable that the same line might be
produced by some other substance at present unknown."

From Prof. Whitney we extract the following in regard to the
use of analogy in philology : " So far back as we can trace the his-
tory of language, the forces which have been efficient in producing
its changes and the general outline of their modes of operation, have
been the same, and we are justified in concluding — we are even com-
pelled to infer — that they have been the same from the outset. There
is no way of investigating the first hidden steps of any continuous
historical process, except by carefully studying the later recorded
steps and cautiously applying the analogies thence deduced. So the
5

98 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

Of course, the knowledge derived in this way,
whether by science or religion, is but inferential,
and, moreover, merely probable. He must be very
ignorant of Science who reproaches Religion with
the employment of inference or merely probable ar-
guments, as if she alone were a sinner, or guilty
above her physical sister. Science is as much the
daughter of reason as of the senses. If the first
step in induction is observation, the second is al-
ways what inference the observations justify. It is
from this point of view that Herbert Spencer gives
as one definition of science, " an extension of the
perceptions by means of reasoning" ("Recent Dis-
cussions," p. 160). Observed facts do not deserve the
name of science until they have been arranged by
the magnet of some idea and marshaled in the on-
ward column of some argument. " Isolated facts
and experiments," says Helmholtz, in his lecture
upon the "Aim and Progress of Physical Science"
(" Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects," p. 369),
" have in themselves no value, however great their
number may be. They only become valuable in a

geologist studies the forces which are now altering by slow degrees
the form and aspect of the earth's crust, wearing down the rocks
here, depositing beds of sand and pebbles there, pouring out floods
of lava over certain regions, raising or lowering the line of coast
along certain seas ; and he applies the result of his observations
with confidence to the explanation of phenomena dating from a time
to which men's imaginations, even, can hardly reach. The legiti-
macy of the analogical reasoning is not less undeniable in the one
case than in the other." — (Whitney's " Language and the Study of
Language," p. 253.)

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 99

theoretical or practical point of view, when they
make us acquainted with the law of a series of uni-
formly-recurring phenomena ; it may be, only give a
negative result, showing an incompleteness in our
knowledge of such a law, till then held to be per-
fect. ... To find the law by which they are regu-
lated is to understand phenomena."

Science, then, supplies no valuable knowledge
till its crude facts are crystallized by inferences, and
built up into conclusions. And it is rare, in physical
investigations, that these conclusions are more than
probable. There are some cases, of course, where
our investigation may be made exhaustive. Such
are the cases where our inquiry is limited to a small
class, a definite portion of matter, a moderate extent
of time or area of space. But in almost all cases,
not alone in analogical reasoning, but in the best
inductions, in all those which much advance knowl-
edge, our conclusions must pass beyond the narrow
confines of our data. "In natural history," says
Prof. Henfrey,1 "it is rarely in our power to ascer-
tain all the particulars requisite for any given induc-
tion ; it is scarcely ever possible to use this demon-
strative induction. We are continually obliged to
derive a general consequence from a portion of the
particular cases which it ought to rest upon, and in
such cases we anticipate the agreement of the rest,
basing the hypothesis upon analogy. In this way

1 "The Study of Botany," Youmans's "Culture demanded by
Modern Life."

100 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

we arrive, not at absolute certainties, but at great
probabilities." Similarly says Prof. Youmans, now
the editor of The Popular Science Monthly^ speak-
ing of the study of biology,1 " Complete or demon-
strative induction being impossible, we are com-
pelled to form conclusions from only a part of the
facts involved, and to anticipate the agreement of
the rest."* So, also, says Prof. De Morgan, speak-
ing of induction : " Since it is practically impossible
to examine all particulars, the statement of a univer-
sal from its particulars is only probable, unless it
should happen that we can detect some law connect-
ing the instances by which the result when obtained
as to a certain number may be inferred as to the rest.
. . . This induction by connection is common enough
in mathematics, but can hardly occur in any other
kind of knowledge."

TTkenever we get a clear idea of the vast num-
bers of permutations and combinations which may
be possible with no very great number of various
agents or conditions, we learn how hopeless it would
be to attempt to treat Xature in detail, and make ex-
haustive inductions. It has been recommended, for
example, that a systematic examination of all alloys
of metals should be carried out, proceeding from the
most simple binary compounds to the more compli-
cated ternary and quaternary ones. But if only
thirty of the known metals were operated upon, the
number of binary alloys, it is calculated, would be

1 " Culture demanded by Modern Life," p. 34.

THE CLAIM OF SCIEXCE. 101

435, of ternary alloys -1,060, of quaternary 27,405,
without paying any regard to the varying propor-
tions of the metals. If we varied all the ternary al-
loys by quantities not less than one per cent., the num-
ber of these alloys only would be over 11,000,000.
So also in regard to the possible chemical combina-
tions. Taking the number of elements at sixty-one,
the number of compounds containing different se-
lections of four elements each would be more than
half a million. As the same elements often com-
bine in different proportions, it would hardly be pos-
sible to assign any limit to the possible compounds
that chemistry can furnish. Under such circum-
stances, it is inevitable that induction should never
give more than incomplete knowledge.1

In regard to political science, John Stuart Mill,
in his inaugural address, as Rector of the University
of St. Andrew's, said : " It is evident, to whoever
comes to the study from that of the experimental
sciences, that no political conclusions of any value
for practice can be arrived at by direct experience.
Such specific experience as we can have serves only
to verify, and even that insufficiently, the conclu-
sions of reasoning. . . . All true political science is,
in one sense of the phrase, a priori, being deduced
from the tendencies of things, tendencies known
either through our general experience of human na-
ture, or as the result of an analysis of the course of
history considered as a progressive evolution."

1 Jevons, vol. i., p. 218.

102 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

The same is true of the other sciences, and espe-
cially of the great natural laws. The law of gravi-
itj, for example, has never been proved by any ex-
haustive induction. Only a small portion of terres-
trial matter, and a few of the myriad stars of heaven,
have been tested as conforming to it. The first law
of motion that " every body continues in its state of
rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, except
in so far as it may be compelled by impressed forces
to change that state," can never be proved by induc-
tion. That a real body should move uniformly in a
straight line, is contrary to all observation. It not
only has never been seen, but can never be seen.
As Lewes says, " No such phenomenon could pre-
sent itself in a universe like ours, where motion is
always accelerated or retarded, and always more or
less divergent from a straight line."

The same is true of the conservation of energy.
All the inductive proof that can be given of it is
only approximative. There is always a certain dis-
crepance between the sum of force we start with in
one form, such as heat, and the sum we recover in
another form, such as motion. This discrepance, in
careful experiments, may be very slight. By still
greater care it may be made so infinitesimal that in
practice it maybe disregarded. But the discrepance
is always there, and, however close we may approach
to an absolute equivalence, we can never attain it.
As Jevons says,1 " The most that we can do by experi-

1 Vol. ii., p. 83.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 1Q3

ment is, to show that the energy entering into any ex-
perimental combination is almost exactly equal to
what comes out of it, and the more nearly so-, the
more exactly we perform all the measurements. Ab-
solute equality is always a matter of assumption."
Long before we reach that point, the thread we are
tracing grows so fine as no longer to be held by our
fingers. Should some minute part of it vanish, we
could not detect the loss. The cogency granted to
the scientific proof of either the first law of motion,
or the conservation of energy, or the indestructibility
of matter or force, depends upon the experience that,
the farther we extend our observation, the more deli-
cate we make our tests, and exclude disturbing con-
ditions, the nearer we come to the realization of the
law.1 It is but the same kind of approximative evi-
dence which religion brings to show the benevolence
and providence of God. As we understand Nature
and human events more and more thoroughly, we
find more and more that every thing is good.

The fact is, as Stanley Jevons says,2 " not one of
the inductive truths which men have established, or
think they have established, is really safe from ex-
ception or reversal. . . . Euler expresses no more than
the truth when he says that it would be impossible
to fix on any one thing really existing of which we
could have so perfect a knowledge as to put us be-
yond the reach of mistake/' Though we have ob-

1 Jevons, vol. ii., p. 271.

2 "Principles of Science," vol. i., p. 274.

104 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

served ten thousand swans to be white, it does not fol-
low but what the next swan may be black. Though
we have observed flame to burn a hundred million
times, it does not follow but what the next time it
may not — the law ruling it being a change-bearing
one, such as Babbage made in one of his calculating-
machines, or some unsuspected cause being in exist-
ence which may produce a different effect.1 " The

1 Few, probably, are aware how large a number of examples of
these change-bearing laws and exceptions to what has been supposed
universal uniformities, have been disclosed by recent science.

The expansion of solids and liquids by heat, and their contraction
by cold, is a law so general and intimately connected with the very
theory of heat, that it would seem as if a real anomaly to it ought
not to be expected. Indeed, for a long time no exception was ob-
served. But modern researches have disclosed the fact that stretched
India-rubber and a few other solids contract, instead of expanding,
by heat, and that water, though conforming to the usual law from
212° Fahr. down to 39^°, then changes, and from 39|° to its freezing-
point expands with the increase of cold.

Again, it is one of the most important and rigorous laws of chem-
istry that equal volumes of gases exactly correspond to equivalent
weights of the substances. Unfortunately, phosphorus and arsenic
give vapors exactly twice as dense as they should do by analogy, and
mercury and cadmium diverge in the other direction, giving vapors
half as dense as we should expect. Physicists assert again, as an
absolutely universal law, that in liquefaction heat is absorbed, yet
Bulphur is, at least, an apparent exception. Until a recent discovery
of Mr. Hermann Smith, all our knowledge of rods and strings, plates
and membranes, had agreed in the law of isochronism — that, however
the amplitude may vary, the times of vibration will be the same.
But in the so-called " air-reed," into which the stream of air is mould-
ed in the embouchure of an organ-pipe, an absolute reversal of this
is exhibited. (See Nature, 1874, vol. x., p. 161.)

A multitude of further similar cases might be quoted. The num.

THE CLAIM OF SCIEXCE. 1Q5

conclusions of scientific inference," to quote Jevons
again,1 " appear to be always of an hypothetical and
purely provisional nature. The best-calculated re-
sults which it can give are never absolute probabili-
ties; they are purely relative to the extent of our
information. It seems to be impossible for us to
judge how far our experience gives us adequate
information of the universe as a whole, and of all
the forces and phenomena which can have place
therein." 2

To the same effect I may quote, from the oppo-
site side of the philosophical camp, the declarations
of Taine and Lewes. Speaking of the laws of real
things gained by induction, Taine says : " However
well-established and verified one of these laws may
be, if we wish to apply it outside of the little circle
of space and short fragment of duration to which
our observations are limited, it becomes probable
only. It is not absolutely certain that the law of
gravitation continues to hold good beyond the far-
thest nebulee of Herschel. It is not at all certain
that, in the sun, oxygen and hydrogen preserve the

ber of them, in fact, is so great, that Jevons declares that " it would
be easy to point out an almost infinite number of other unexplained
anomalies." — ("Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 341.)

1 "Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 465.

2 The passages quoted from Jevons are but two out of a dozen
similar passages that might be quoted, in which the merely probable
nature of scientific conclusions is emphatically affirmed. (See vol. i.,
pp. 3, 265, 271, 275 ; vol. ii., pp. 429, 432, 443, 459.)

106 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.
chemical affinity which we find they have here with

us." '

" In this assumption," says Lewes, " of an iden-
tity amid diversity, this inference, that what has
been found to coexist with certain characters will be
found elsewhere to coexist with similar characters,
lies the whole reach of induction. . . . Consequent-
ly, induction can never be more than a more or less
probable guess. It is not knowledge till it ceases to
be inductive by the verification of each of its applied
inferences." 2

The Gordian knots of existence not allowing
themselves thus to be untied by any complete induc-
tions, they must be severed in some more summary
way. Religion does so by its grand hypotheses of
God and soul — for they are in a certain sense hy-
potheses— transcending at first, nay, transcending
forever, the sweep of any possible induction. Tor
thus resorting to hypotheses Religion has always been
reproached, and it has had commended to it the Ba-
conian method of laborious accumulation of facts,
and careful and orderly abstraction from them of
general axioms or laws. It has been reminded of
Newton's warning against " anticipations." It has
been admonished to recall the similar scholium of
the great philosopher, "Whatever is not deduced
from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis,

1 " On Intelligence," p. 426.

2 G. H. Lewes's " Problems of Life and Mind," vol. ii., p. 159.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 107

and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical,
have no place in experimental philosophy." But, in
point of fact, it is just this procedure of anticipating
Nature, of framing hypotheses, which has yielded
all the more lofty and successful results of science.
" Those who have most advanced the natural science
since Bacon's day," says Prof. Henfrey, "have de-
parted from the rigorous method of induction, and
by this alone rendered possible the rapid progress
of the sciences." To the same effect, says Prof.
Jevons,1 " whether we look to Galileo and Gilbert,
his contemporaries, or to Newton and Descartes, his
successors, we find that discovery was achieved by
the exactly opposite method to that advanced by
Bacon." In spite of Newton's condemnation of
hypotheses, " the greater part of his ' Principia,'
says Prof. Jevons, "is purely hypothetical." His
practice is the most splendid vindication of their
use. Huyghens's brilliant achievements were gained
bv the same means.

The history of the inductive sciences, to quote
the words of Whewell, " is the rise of theories out
of facts and the passing of theories into facts." La-
place's, Darwin's, Spencer's great scientific achieve-
ments are all hypotheses.2 Geology, paleontology,
archaeology, are all built up by hypotheses. These
sciences are but the interpretations we have guessed

1 Fortnightly Review, 1873, p. ?80.

8 " Tyndall's Fragments of Science," pp. 155-159.

108 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

for a few of Nature's infinite hieroglyphics. " Nei-
ther induction nor deduction," Auguste Comte him-
self has said, " would enable us to understand even the
simplest phenomena, if we did not often commence
by anticipation on the results ; " and in his discourse
delivered before the British Association in Liver-
pool, in 1870, Prof. Tyndall has urged upon his sci-
entific comrades the importance of the imagination
as the mightiest instrument of physical investiga-
tion, and indicates as the organ that is finally to
solve the ultimate problems of physics, " spiritual
insight." " Bounded and conditioned by cooperant
reason" savs Tvndall, " imagination becomes the
mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer.
Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling
moon was at the outset a leap of the imagination.
When William Thomson tries to place the ultimate
particles of matter between his compass-points, and
to apply to them a scale of millimetres, he is power-
fully aided by this faculty. And in much that has
been recently said about protoplasm and life, we
have the outgoings of the imagination guided and
controlled by the known analogies of science. In
fact, without this power, our knowledge of Nature
would be a mere tabulation of coexistences and se-
quences. We should still believe in the succession of
day and night, of summer and winter ; but the soul
of Force would be dislodged from our universe ;
causal relations would disappear, and with them that
science which is now building the parts of Nature

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 109

into an organic whole." x It needs hardly to be re-
marked, that hypotheses, imagination, insight, are
but secular names for the action and faculty which,
under the standard of Religion, are so much scoffed
at as "faith."

4. But scientific faith, it will be said, legitimates
itself by the test of verification. Religious faith
does not. It is the bringing of its doctrines, by
whatever argument supported, whether by intuition,
authority, evidence, analogy, or hypotheses, square-
ly up to the test of verification as a final and deci-
sive test, that justifies these methods in the hands of
Science. And it is the disuse of this test by Religion
that in her hands renders them suspicious. Xow, on
the one hand, Religion, as I shall show further on, is
able to confirm its fundamental propositions by veri-
fications similar to those employed by Science. On
the other hand, the doctrines of science, even those

1 "Fragments of Science," p. 130.

The editor of The Popular Science Monthly, for March, 1875,
in answer to a criticism upon Tyndall, for this use of mental pictur-
ing in science, says : " Our writer says that ' Science starts with
observation and experiment ; ' but the real starting-point is farther
back. A mental representation must be made before it can be
verified. A certain state of things is conceived or put together in
thought, and is called an hypothesis ; and then observation and ex-
periment are appealed to, to test the correctness of the representation,
the truthfulness of the mental picture. Science is not merely seeing
with the eye, or fumbling with instruments. Any blockhead can do
these ; but it is to reconstruct Nature in thought. ... To do this
the imagination or image-forming faculty comes into incessant play."
(p. 621.)

HO PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

generally accepted, are in many cases destitute of
any proper verification.

For instance : The fundamental law in pneu-
matics, that, where gases are allowed to mix, every
_ - is in a constant state of diffusion of every part
into every part, cannot be verified by observation ;
for in very many if not most cases the portions of
_ ses, or the different gases, cannot be followed
and identified. One atom of oxygen, for example,
is practically undistinguishable from another atom.
Only by keeping a certain volume of gas safely
inclosed in a bottle can we assure ourselves of its
entity. Allow it to mix with other oxvo^en, and
we have lost all power of identification.

The results of celestial spectroscopy, based as we
have seen them to be on analo<rv, allow no means of
verification. For the assumptions underlying them
— that substances on celestial bodies vibrate exactly

■

as substances on the earth, and that some different
substance, either a known or an unknown one, cannot
have svnehronous vibrations with the substance ob-
- rved here to have these vibrations — can never be
established. Should either assumption be reasona-
bly suspected to be erroneous, as the last already has
en by Prof. Young, from certain phenomena, the
whole superstructure would fall with it.

Social science, as John Stuart Mill has pointed
out,1 is incapable of direct verification. The nebular
and the development hypotheses, and all the accounts

System of Logic," Book VI., Chapter IX., Sec. 6.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. \\\

of the past history of the universe, in the astronomi-
cal, geological, or biological departments, are incapa-
ble of direct verification.1 Xone of these events have

1 In TyndalTs " Belfast Address,'' he speaks of the provability
of the doctrine of evolution as follows : " The strength of the doc-
trine of evolution consists, not in an experimental demonstration (for
the subject is hardly accessible to this mode of proof), but in its gen-
eral harmony with the method of Nature as hitherto known."

George H. Lewes speaks of the two hypotheses of the origin of
life, that of creation and that of natural selection, as follow? : ta Both
these hypotheses of origin must always remain hypotheses. Knowl-
edge of what things are under observed conditions may be absolute ;
it can never lead to more than hypothetical statements of what things
were under other conditions ; and since it is manifestly impossible
that we should ever know what were the exact conditions under
which organic life emerged, we can do no more than guess at ori-
gins."— (" Problems of Life and Mind," vol. ii., p. 76.)

Still more emphatic is the testimony of Prof. Huxley. Speaking
of the animal pedigree assigned to man by Darwin and Haeckel, he
says : " It need hardly be said that, in dealing with such a problem
as this, Science rapidly passes beyond the bounds of positive, verifi-
able fact, and enters those of more or less justifiable speculation. But
there are very few scientific problems, even of those which have been
and are being most successfully solved, which have been or can be
approached in any other way.

" Our views respecting the nature of the planets, of the sun and
stars, are speculations which are not and cannot be directly verified ;
that great instrument of research, the atomic hypothesis, is a specu-
lation which cannot be directly verified ; the statement that an ex-
tinct animal, of which we know only the skeleton, and never can know
anv more, had a heart and lungs, and gave birth to young which were
developed in such and such a fashion, may be one which admits of
no reasonable doubt, but it is an unverifiable hypothesis. I may be
as sure as I can be of any thing that I had a thought, yesterday morn-
ing, which I took care neither to utter nor to write down, but my con-
viction is an utterly unverifiable hypothesis. So that unverified and

112 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

ever been tested by observation, or can ever hence-
forth be tested by observation. What physicist stood
by and saw the glowing gas condense into sun and
planets? What savant watched the annulosa de-
velop the primordial vertebrate ; the amphibia the
mammal ; the mammal the man ? What man of to-
day looked on the dry land uniting England with
France, or the seas that once covered Wales, the
Netherlands, or the larger part of Russia? What
scientific enchanter holds the wand that can roll
back the wheel of Time to those long-passed epochs ?
or what experimenter so mighty as to be able
to reproduce all those vanished conditions of the
universe which gave birth to its primeval phe-
nomena ? The only verification possible in any of
these great departments is to show that the cause
assigned, according to present laws of causation,
would account for the phenomena. Not that they
did cause them, nor that the laws of causation have
come down unchanged, nor even that no other cause
could have produced the given effects. The same is
true of those important scientific theories, the atomic
constitution of chemical substances and the ether-
waves 1 which are regarded universally as the vehicle

even unverifiable hypotheses may be great aids to the progress of
knowledge, may have a right to be believed with a high degree of as-
surance." (See article, " Darwin and Haeckel," p. 596, Popular Sci-
ence Monthly, March, 1875.)

1 " The domain in which this motion of light is carried on," says
Tyndall, " lies entirely beyond the reach of our senses. The waves
of light require a medium for their formation and propagation, but

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. H3

of light. No verification by any kind of observa-
tion is possible.1 For the most powerful microscope
has never discerned a molecule or an atom. They
are at least a thousand times smaller, according to
Thomson's calculations, than any particle which the
microscope can discern. They are as pure assump-
tions as the vortices of Descartes, or the emitted cor-
puscles of Newton's theory of light. All the verifi-
cation that can be given is to show, in the phrase
which Tyndall so frequently uses, in his paper on
the "Scientific Imagination," that the phenomena
occur as if there were such substrata. There is
nothing to prove that they are actually there, or
that some other better explanation may not be dis-
covered and banish them, as the belief in emitted
corpuscles and imponderable fluids has already been
dismissed.

So, again, the truths of geometry, the doctrines
of the indestructibility of matter and force, and the
uniformity of Nature, all laws claiming universality
and absoluteness, as it was before shown that they
could not be proved by observation, so neither can
they be verified by experience, that is, in their uni-
versality and absoluteness. Their only verification
is approximative and probable.

we cannot see, or feel, or taste, or smell this medium." — (Tyndall's
"Fragments of Science," p. 214.)

1 " It is not pretended that the existence of atoms has been or can
be proved or disproved." — (Presidential Address of Prof. Lovering
before the American Association at Hartford, 1874.)

114 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

Thus is it shown by examination that Science,
when she would grasp any of the wider laws and
deeper secrets of Nature, must and does employ the
very methods for which Religion is rejected, and is
open to the same objections. If the one is not to be
rejected or doubted because of these, why is the
other ? If the physicist may rely upon man's natu-
ral faith in an external reality, and in the practical
veracity of his physical senses, why may not the
spiritualist rely upon the same natural faith of man-
kind, when it declares the inward reality of the soul
and the veracity of moral and spiritual discernment ?
If the scientific world accept the belief in the inde-
structibility of force as an ultimate belief, not to be
questioned, why may not the religious world legiti-
mately receive the natural belief of man in the im-
mortality of the soul as a similar ultimate belief, not
to be distrusted ? If the student of Nature custom-
arily receives the word of a Newton, a Laplace, or
a Tyndall, as presumably to be trusted, even when
declaring that which he cannot fully understand,
why may not the Christian disciple accept the au-
thority of a superior spiritual discerner, like Jesus
Christ, with a similar confidence ? If the optician
may lawfully deduce from the phenomena of light,
that he studies, the hypothesis of an invisible, infi-
nite ether, why may not the theist, with equal justi-
fication, infer from the kosmic phenomena, that he
studies, the hypothesis of an invisible, infinite Cre-
ator and Guardian ; and if the one hypothesis is not

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. H5

to be declared a " mere figment of the scientific fan-
cy " 1 because it cannot be directly verified by sense-
perception, why is the other to be regarded as a fig-
ment of the religious imagination, merely because
it lacks the same kind of sense-demonstration?

1 Tyndall's "Fragments of Science," p. 133.

$IQ PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

CHAPTER V.

FAITHS OF SCIENCE — AIMS AND OBJECTS.

Thus it is seen that science rests on the same
grounds and employs the same methods which its
champions have censured religion for using.

But perhaps it will be said that, although sci-
ence and religion have no realty different grounds or
methods, yet the different objects to which they are
applied in each justify men in refusing to the propo-
sitions of theology the same credit that they give to
those of physical inquiry. There is certainly an
apparent difference of this kind, seeming to many
very real and broad, which ought not to be omitted
from any thorough discussion of this subject. An
opponent of religion would put it something like
this :

Religion, perhaps, may employ the same instru-
mentalities as science, but the trouble is, she aims to
master with them truths which they are not compe-
tent to grasp. Science deals with material masses,
their relations of heat, color, weight, and their

FAITHS OF SCIEXCF. H7

changes of form, bulk, place, quality, etc. — all of
them things visible and tangible.

The endeavor of religion, however, is to estab-
lish the existence, nature, and relations of immate-
rial beings, called spirits ; a Supreme Spirit behind
and above all Xature, and minor spirits within each
human body — things which no sense can ever dis-
cern.

Science attends to phenomena, their coexistences
and successions. It busies itself about those things
only of which there is or can be experience. Re-
ligion aspires to go behind the empirical to the met-
empirical. It talks of ideal conceptions and super-
sensual objects.

Science, again, limits itself to the aspects of
things in their relations to us, under the limitations of
earthly life, and as they may be clearly comprehend-
ed by us. Religion, on the contrary, dreams of the
Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal, and loses itself
in the mazes of the contradictory and the inconceiv-
able. Behold in this difference of aims and objects
the ample justification of the modern suspicions of
religion. Immaterial Spirit, First Cause, Eternal,
Infinite, Absolute — how can such things ever be
known ? What finger ever touched them, what
optic or auditory nerve ever gave report of them,
what telescope was ever or can ever be made so
space-penetrating, what microscope so delicate in
its scrutiny as to discern objects of this nature ?
" They are," says Biichner, " arbitrary assumptions

118 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

without any real basis." " Human thought and
human knowledge," he maintains,1 are " incapable of
discovering or knowing any thing supersensual."
" The materialist," says Virchow, " can never be
satisfied with it : he knows only bodies and their
qualities ; what is beyond he terms transcendental,
and he considers transcendentalism as an aberration
of the human mind."

Indeed, to the physical inquirer, supersensual
and immaterial things are not even conceivable.
" A force not united to matter, but floating freely
above it," Moleschott characterizes as " an ideal no-
tion." The idea of immaterial spirit, Carl Vogt
declares to be " a pure hypothesis," and assigns it a
place among " speculative fables." " The remark
of a somewhat crazy, but all the more ingenious,
father of the Church," says the author of the " Old
Faith and the New " (p. 152), " has become the prin-
ciple of modern science — ' Naught is immaterial
but what is naught.' "

Similarly says Biichner : " Those who talk of a
creative power which is said to have produced the
world out of nothing are ignorant of the first and
most simple principle founded upon experience and
the contemplation of Nature. How could a power
have existed not manifested in material substance,
but governing it arbitrarily according to individual
views ? Neither could separately existing forces be
transferred to chaotic matter, and produce the world

" Force and Matter," p. xli., Introduction.

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 119

in this manner ; for we have seen that a separate
existence of either is an impossibility." 1

Certainly, say the scientific objectors, it is not
for man to comprehend God, for the finite to
think to find out the Infinite. All conceptions in-
volving Infinity, Self-Existence, Eternity, Absolute
Being (Herbert Spencer labors at length to show, in
the second and fourth chapters of his " First Prin-
ciples," and in other parts of his writings repeats the
statement again and again), are but " pseudo-ideas,"
" cymbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order."
Eve*y religious system " involves itself in the un-
thinkable." Every theologian who attempts to tell
the nature of God or the soul falls into contradic-
tion and absurdity. All the real knowledge that we
can attain to is, that " the power which the universe
manifests is utterly inscrutable," a conclusion to
which Profs. Huxley and Tyndall give repeated and
emphatic amens. " As little in our day, as in the days
of Job," says Prof. Tyndall, " can man by searching
find this power out." 2 Quoting the reply of Napo-
leon, when, to the savants who tried to account for
the universe without any Divine agency, raising his
finger to the heavens, he said, " It is all very well,
gentlemen, but who made all these ? ' Prof. Tyn-
dall says : 3 " As far as I can see, there is no quality
in the human intellect which is fit to be applied

1 " Force and Matter," chapter i.

* Address before the British Association, Belfast, 1874.

* Fragments of Science," p. 93.

120 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

to the solution of the problem. It entirely trail*
scends us. The phenomena of matter and force lie
within our intellectual range, and as far as they
reach we will, at all events, push our inquiries, but
behind and above and around the real mystery lies
unsolved, and as far as we are concerned is incapable
of solution."

Xow, the defender of religion would not deny
that there are mysteries insoluble both to religion
and science. He would not deny that we must,
from the nature of the case, remain ever in igno-
rance of much, probably of most, that relates to the
origin and history of the universe, the character, na-
ture, laws, and relations of God and the soul. But
he claims that, though we cannot know all, though
we cannot know any thing, perhaps, with absolute
certainty, yet we can know something with strong
probability — probability equal to that with which
men are satisfied in the realm of science. Human
intellect cannot, of course, fathom to the bottom
the depths of spirit. It cannot comprehend all the
mysteries of the Divine. But it can drop the plum-
met of thought deep enough to know whether that
which it is dealing with is matter, such as we know,
or something else. It can trace out a section of the
Infinite hyperbola sufficient to show whether the
curve runs by chance or by law, whether its course is
toward the irrational or the rational, toward the evil
or the good, toward matter or toward spirit. And
narrow as the circle of warrantable belief may be

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. x2l

in comparison with the vast sea of the unknowable
encircling and conlining it, yet Science no more than
[Religion confines her credence to the sphere of the
senses, the circle of the material, or the range
wherein nothing inconceivable or contradictory is
met with. To claim that in this respect there is
any substantial difference between science and reli-
gion is a most unfounded pretension. For it can be
shown, here as before, that Science is in the same
box as Religion, and shoots her arrows at just as
transcendental targets.

First, Science no more than Religion restricts its
belief to what it can see, hear, touch, smell, feel.
Xo more than its rival does it accept the horizon of
sense as commensurate with the possibilities of
knowledge or existence.

The illustrations of this in the circle of the sci-
ences are countless. If human knowledge had
been, as Buchner maintains it is, incapable of attain-
ing to any thing supersensual, its attainments would
have been comparatively meagre. Take the most
familiar instructions of science, and half of them
are things which, if appearance before the bar of
the senses is to be taken as the test of credence,
would have to be disbelieved. It is a fundamental
law in the science of projectiles, for example, that
a rifle-ball or cannon-shot, discharged from the gun,
describes in its flight a parabola. Yet, what physi-
cal observer has followed out with his physical eye
the tracing of that curve through the air from the
6

122 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

cannon's mouth to the point where it fell, so as exactly
to observe or verify it ? Again, probably no man of
science doubts that our earth has poles — points, that
is, at the extreme north and at the extreme south of
our globe, so differently situated from all other points
on the globe that an observer there would find his
sight of sun and stars unaffected by that daily revo-
lution that, in every man's past experience, wher-
ever he may have been, hourly shifts the apparent
position of the heavenly bodies. Here is a most
singular phenomenon, opposed to men's daily expe-
rience, yet held as an unquestioned part of science.
Nevertheless, no human eve has ever beheld these
spots, or is ever likely to behold them. Xo astron-
omer, again, has ever seen the other side of the
moon. Yet shall we hesitate to believe that it has
one ? No chemist has ever seen, grasped, tasted, or
si iielt, pure oxygen. Even when Andrews com-
pressed it to the density of water, it still remained
colorless to the eye, tasteless to the tongue, odorless
to the nose, ungraspable by the hand, manifesting
itself only by its gravitative, repulsive, chemic, or
other forces. Shall we consign, therefore, to the
limits of non-existence what constitutes eight-ninths
of water, one-half of the earth's crust, and three-
fourths of organized beings ?

People in general may be forgiven for thinking
that the senses are capable of detecting all that ex-
ists. But the thorough scientist is just the man
who best knows, or ought to know, how comparative-

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 123

ly small a part of the universe of things the senses
can catch a glimpse of. He has scientifically meas-
ured them and taken the gamut of their power.
With the sirene he counts the vibrations of audible
sound, and finds that the ordinary ear can hear no
note less than fifteen vibrations a second nor more
than forty-two thousand. Below or above this limit
there is silence to the human ear, yet he does not
believe that the vibration of the air ceases, or would
be inaudible to an auditory organ of wider compass.
"With the prism he untwists the rays of the solar
beam, and by delicate processes measures their ve«
locity. Only those whose rates exceed three hun-
dred and ninety-nine billion vibrations a second, or
fall below eight hundred and thirty-one billion,1 are
visible to the eye. Yet the man of science does not
regard the vibrations as ceasing beyond these limits.
When at the extreme red end of the spectrum they
cease to be visible, the thermometer and the ther-
mopyle still detect them by their heat, and beyond
the extreme violet the phenomena of fluorescence
or photo-chemical action disclose them as chemical
force. " The light-giving rays from any object are
only a fraction," says Tyndall, " of the total radia-
tion." In the electric light, for instance, they con-
stitute no more than one-ninth. a

There are thus sounds to which we are deaf,
light to which we are blind, heat, magnetism, elec-

1 Herschel's "Familiar Lectures," p. 312.
5 " Fragments of Science," p. 206.

124 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

tricity to which we are insensible. A thousand forms
of force strike us hourly, and our dull nerves know
it not. A thousand objects and motions envelop us,
and the narrow boundaries of our organs fail to
take them in. It was in the belief that there was a
vast deal more to see than the naked eye could dis-
cern; that physical investigators with infinite inge-
nuity and patience have contrived instruments for
magnifying the invisible, until it was brought within
the scope of sense.

And their faith has been well rewarded. In
what seemed the blank darkness of the heavens
there have been revealed to them suns and nebulae,
planets and attendant moons. In what seemed a
simple, unoccupied drop of water, there has been
disclosed a host of both organic and inorganic bod-
ies, the plants as actively moving as the animals,
and the mineral particles dancing about with as in-
cessant motion as if alive. In the last half -century
the men of science have seen telescope and micro-
scope continually increased in power, and other
instruments, equally wonderful in widening the
realm of observation, invented and improved, and
never have they found increased power fail to dis-
cover beyond the former limit of perception still
more phenomena.

Suppose these instruments still further increased,
no matter how much, and who doubts that still
new sights, now undiscernible, would open before
us ? Or suppose that human ingenuity should de-

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 125

vise telescopes and microscopes for the ear, for the
sense of taste, smell, or touch, and who doubts that
facts before imperceptible by any sense would be-
come revealed to us ? The very possibility, how-
ever, of such greater victories of sense implies real
and knowable existence beyond the grasp of pres-
ent sense.

In their own held of inquiry, physicists freely
assert this. Tyndall justly speaks of " that region
inaccessible to sense, which embraces so much of
the intellectual life of the physical investigator."

De La "Rive ascribed the haze of the Alps to
floating organic germs ; and the advocates of the
germ theory of disease and the opponents of spon-
taneous generation maintain, as their basic fact, the
profuse existence in common air of such living
germs, pelting us every moment, yet nnfelt and un-
seen. Whether or not such infinitesimal organic
germs exist, yet we have in the atmosphere," says
Tyndall,1 " particles that defy both the microscope
and the balance, which do not darken the air, and
which exist, nevertheless, in multitudes sufficient to
reduce to insignificance the Israelitish hyperbole re-
garding the sands upon the sea-shore."

To identify what the microscope fails to see
with the non-existent, Prof. Tyndall deems so grave
an error as to take pains to caution biologists against
it. " "When, for example, the contents of a cell are
described as perfectly homogeneous, as absolutely

1 "Fragments of Science," p. 151.

126 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

structureless, because the microscope fails to distin-
guish any structure, then, I think the microscope
begins to play a mischievous part," and he proceeds
to point out, in regard to the profound and complex
changes of structure which occur when water is
frozen or polarized, that absolutely none of them
can be discerned by the microscope. " The causes
in which similar conditions hold," he adds, " are
simply numberless. Have the diamond, the ame-
thyst, and the countless other crystals formed in the
laboratories of Nature and of man no structure ?
Assuredly they have ; but what can the microscope
make of it ? Nothing." l

From the mineralogist and biologist, turn to the
chemist. Ask him if he makes the limit of the
senses, even when widened to the utmost range to
which the most delicate instruments can push it, the
limit, in his belief, of real existence or knowledge — ■
and what must be his honest answer ? To show you
how the whole of chemistry, as a systematized science,
is based upon the existence of the molecule and the
atom. When the chemist deals with his various
substances, he meets such problems as these : How
can a body dilate and contract, be melted, vapor-
ized, or solidified ? What puts a limit to the pro-
cess of attenuation ? Whv do chemical substances
nnite only in definite proportions ? And the result
to which he is brought is that a body, such as a grain
of salt, is not a simple compact body, but an aggre-

1 " Fragments of Science," pp. 152, 153.

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 127

gation of minute corpuscles, which he calls mole-
cules, and these molecules, in their turn, a group of
still smaller and simpler particles, called atoms.
The aggregate formed by these particles seems to
our senses solid, continuous, and motionless, yet in
reality neither its molecules nor its atoms are in
contact, nor remain a single minute at rest. By a
certain repulsive power, each atom holds itself off
from too close proximity to its neighbor. By a
certain attractive power it draws toward it such
atoms as it has an affinity for, disengages them from
other groups, and brings them into league with it-
self. Through the play of their mutual forces, the
atoms are marshaled in jnst the right number into
a certain order or position. With ceaseless oscilla-
tions all these atoms are swinging to and fro, cir-
cling around some point of equilibrium. Send a
current of electricity through the midst of them, and
their path becomes more or less elliptic ; put them
under the influence of a magnet, and they assume a
peculiar helicoidal motion in varying planes. Ap-
ply heat, and the vibrations become ampler and
more rapid. Increase the heat, and they leave
their circular paths and fly off tangentially, moving
rectilineally through space. Atoms clash against
atoms, rebound, and with ceaseless impact cannon-
ade whatever object would hem them in. Joule
calculated the velocity of this atomic bombardment,
and found that the boasted guns of modern warfare
are unable to compete with it. Sir "William Thorn-

12S PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

son has estimated their size, and set down the maxi-
mum distance of the chemical atoms in molecules as
the ten-millionth part of one-twenty-fifth of an inch.
Other mathematicians have computed their weights
and energies. The things which naturally give to
us the highest conception of force and majesty are
the grand bodies that march so ceaselessly through
the heavens, the tidal movement of oceans from end
to end of the globe, or the fall of huge masses un-
der the power of gravity ; but all this energy is as
nothing in comparison with that which is found to
lie in the atoms. It is the nature and force of the
atoms that give its shape to the crystal, its quality
to the acid or alkali, their color, odor, softness, or
hardness to substances. It is the atoms that build
up every individual body from a drop of water to a
whirling sun.

Now, of all this, the accepted basis of theoreti-
cal chemistry and thermodynamics, how much can
be produced before the bar of the senses? Of
these units of matter, how many have been iso-
lated, separately weighed, measured, or touched ?
Not a single one. Of these ceaseless motions, how
much has been felt or seen % < )f these constant
clashes, how much has been heard ? None at all.
If the microscope was not delicate enough to dis-
cern the particles which give the azure to the sky,
or the infusorial germ which disseminates an epidem-
ic, how far beyond its power of detection must be
these atoms, thousands of which are needed to make

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 129

the smallest of those bodies ? Prof. Tyndall, allud-
ing to Sir William Thomson's studies upon the mo-
lecular process involved in the magnetic polariza-
tion of light, has said ' that, " while dealing with
this question, he lived in a world of matter and
motion, to which the microscope has no passport,
and in which it can afford no aid." That must
be the case with every one who would learn any
thing of either molecule or atom. Nevertheless,
the scientific world believes in them, talks of them,
and uses them, not only in its theoretical reasonings,
but in its practical applications and current instruc-
tions.

If it receives its warrant from no sense, whence,
then, does it derive its belief in these imperceptible
workers, everywhere present and active — these in-
visible kings governing Nature by eternal laws?
Evidently from just such mental apprehensions
and inferences as assure religion of God and the
soul.

We have tracked scientific faith beyond the
farthest ken of the microscope to the infinitesimal
mote, beyond the mote to the molecule, beyond the
molecule to the still minuter, more undiscernible
atom. Does scientific faith here at length make a
halt and refuse to go farther ? Ask optics, and
hear for its answer its report of the existence, as it
believes, of a substance still more tenuous and im-
palpable, still farther beyond any possible discern-

1 "Fragments of Science," p. 153.

130 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

ment by any sense. In the time of Newton, light
was looked npon as a snbtile kind of matter emitted
from luminons bodies, and shot ont npon the senses.
The interplanetary and interstellar spaces were voids,
merely traversed by these minnte missiles. But
serious objections, arising from the peculiar phe-
nomena of refraction, interference, and polarization
of light successively presented themselves. To ex-
plain these, natural philosophers were led to the
theory that the motions of light were those of vibra-
tion, not of translation. But where there are vi-
brations, there must be something to vibrate. Phys-
ics, therefore, filled again the whole universe with a
something which it called ether, which might serve
as the vehicle of the luminous waves. This ether,
it is believed, surrounds every particle, penetrates
every body, fills all space. The hardest iron is not
impervious to it. The most complete atmospheric
vacuum, even the desert voids that reign between
star and star, are full of it, and the absence of com-
mon matter onlv serves to transmit the better the
ethereal waves. A ray of light passing from the
sun to the earth is a column of ether in vibration.
Along it run countless waves, from thirty thousand
to seventy thousand in a single inch, and with such
amazing velocity that trillions of them enter the eye
in the briefest glance at any object. The atoms
which it bathes obey it docilely, like balls floating
upon the water, rising and falling with its waves.
Round their centre of rest they swing in little orbits,

FAITHS OF SCIEXCF. 131

now longer, now smaller, now circular, now elliptical.
At every point this ether exerts forces of enormous
intensity. Sir John Herschel has calculated that its
power of resistance to pressure (and conversely its
own possible pressure on objects that resist it) is up-
ward of seventeen billions of pounds,1 and that the
intensity of the coercive force called into action in
the excitement of a luminous vibration must be
thirty thousand million times that of gravity.2 In
comparison wTith the bulk of this ether, ordinary
matter forms but a very trifling part of the universe.
For, even if we disregard the ether diffused through
ordinary matter and interplanetary spaces, and sup-
pose the whole of our solar system filled with ordi-
nary matter, the proportion between it and the ethe-
real sphere whose radius is the distance of the near-
est fixed star would be only as one to eleven trill-
ions.

And now, if we inquire, again, what warrant from
experience has Science for believing in the lumi-
nous ether, our answer is as before — none. Though
the medium of vision, it and its vibrations are far-
ther beyond all visibleness than the tiniest molecule.
Though more tenacious than steel, we move through
it constantly without feeling it. Though so enor-
mous is its pressure, no balance can weigh it.
Though touching us on every side every second, no
touch of ours can detect it. As Prof. Tyndall 3 has

« "Familiar Lectures," p. 282. 2Ibid., p. 315.

3 " Fragments of Science," p. 215.

132 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

himself said, " the domain in which this motion of
light is carried on lies entirely beyond the reach of
our senses. The waves of light require a medium
for their formation and propagation, but we cannot
see or feel or taste or smell this medium. How,
then, has its existence been established ? By show-
ing that by the assumption of this wonderful, in-
tangible ether all the phenomena of optics are
accounted for with a fullness, and clearness, and
conclusiveness, which leave no desire of the intel-
lect unfulfilled."

But if science may accept the perception and
satisfaction of the reason as good proof of what no
observation can discover, why should religion be
debarred a similar privilege ?

" All that we see of the world," says Pascal, " is
but an imperceptible scratch in the vast range of
Nature." "And the claim of mere experimental-
ism" Paoillon well adds, " is that it mav sentence
men to the fixed and stubborn contemplation of this
mere scratch."

So far from phenomena comprising all that we
can know, the truth is that phenomena give only the
lowest grade of knowledge, and the highest is that
which most transcends phenomena. Prof. Huxley,1
speaking of Auguste Comte's " Positive Philosophy,"
says that the word " positive," " as implying a sys-
tem of thought which assumes nothing beyond the
content of observed facts, implies that which never

1 "Lay Sermons," p. 161.

FAITHS OF SCIEXCE. 133

did exist and never will." The outward and visible
phenomena are but the raw material of knowledge,
or, to use the expression of Tyndall,1 " the counters
of the intellect," " and our science," as he goes on
to say, " would not be worthy of its name and fame,
if it halted at facts, however practically useful, and
neglected the laws which accompany and rule phe-
nomena."

The first step in science, then, is, to group facts
about some thought. Then these first classifications
must be illuminated by some more general concep-
tion ; and if a science is to be developed to the high-
est grade these general conceptions must be synthe-
sized in some law of its laws — some one grand idea
summing it all up. What the physical inquirer thus
pursues amid his retorts, his herbariums, mineralogi-
cal cabinets, or zoological museums, is ideas ; and in
the present state of science there is nothing more
remarkable than the ideal nature of its results. AVe
have seen this already in regard to chemistry and
optics. If we look at geometry we find it to be
throughout a work of mental construction, grounded
upon and guided by pure mental insight of space,
and reasonings therefrom. Had geometrical truths
required for acceptance phenomenal demonstration,
we should not have known a single proposition. An
exact right angle has no existence as a phenomenon,
a perfect sphere is impossible as a fact.

Arithmetic and algebra, similarly, are ideal con-

1 " Fragments of Science," p 227.

134 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

structions built up from the metaphysical conception
of number. It may be said that the idea of number
is simply borrowed from the phenomenal world.
But, as we have it, and use it, it is stripped thorough-
ly of concrete objectivity, and reduced to simple re-
lations between symbolic objects. If number be
altogether a teaching of experience, where did ex-
perience observe its two poles — zero and infinity ?

In astronomy, resting as it does on geometry and
arithmetic, there is necessarily the same idealness.
Kepler's laws of planetary action, and Newton's laws
of motion, are not laws of fact, but types of the
scientific imagination. The postulates of the as-
tronomer, uniform velocity and elliptical motion,
have no place in exact reality. The same is true of
that which the science of mechanics rests on — uni-
form force and rectilineal motion. No eye has seen
or shall see it. So, again, in electricity, magnetism,
thermodynamics, the subtile analyses of modern in-
vestigators have banished altogether the former
theories of material fluids, and substituted the con-
ception of invisible forces. The scientific energies
now believed in are not physical things, but mental
data. Gravity, for example, is not a material entity,
but the correlate of thought to motion, the occult
cause inferred by the mind where change of place is
observed. The fact, in fine, is, as George H. Lewes '
has said, " Were the whole circle of the sciences to
pass before us, each would in turn display the essen-

1 " Problems of Life and Mind," p. 271.

FAITHS OF SCIEXCE. 135

tially ideal nature of its construction," and again, in
his " Philosophy of Aristotle" (p. 66), " The funda-
mental ideas of modem science are as transcendental
as any of the axioms in ancient philosophy."

If transcendentalism be justifiable with science,
why should it be an aberration of mind with religion ?
If the inability of sense to discern many of the things
that science believes in is no bar to a valid knowl-
edge of material things, why should it disprove the
existence of spiritual things ?

Because, perhaps the man of science may here
respond, because all things that science believes
really to exist, though in some cases not such as can
be actually observed, owing to the weakness of our
senses, are always conceivably so. Imagine our
powers of observation sufficiently increased, and they
would become visible and tangible. They belong to
the realm of matter and its qualities ; the quantity
of matter may be very attenuated, but it is matter
still. Whatever ideal constructions science uses are
derived from material phenomena, and are reducible
again to it, or translatable in terms of body and its
functions, or, if not, are recognized as mere fictions,
convenient for calculation or statement, but not re-
garded as things actually existing. To use the recent
distinction which Lewes has proposed, science is
often metaphysical, but never metempirical ; it ac-
cepts the extra-sensible but not the super-sensible.
All that is immaterial is, in the view of science,
non-existent.

136 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

"Were these statements true, there certainly would
exist here an essential difference between the objects
of religion and those of science. It may be venture-
some to deny them, but it does not seem to me that
they are valid. Science, it seems to me, in many
points, implies at least, if it does not directly recog-
nize, the existence of the immaterial.

All the objects that science studies are seen in
space. All the events that it traces are known as
occurring in time. These two, space and time, are
fundamental conditions of all science. Yet neither
space nor time is itself a material thing. The exten-
sion of a body, the duration of a motion or change,
are, to be sure, qualities of material things. But
the space which receives and incloses all extended
matter, the time which is the ground of all suc-
cession or duration, these are not even conceivably
to be seen or heard or felt, not even conceivably to
be regarded as substances, however infinitely attenu-
ated. Sense may tell us of the finite extension of
an individual object, but sense has never and can
never tell us of the Infinite Space which the appre-
hension of each particular extension presupposes.
From experience we may learn of the order and
duration of particular occurrences. But from ex-
perience we cannot learn of the Eternal Time which
is the implied condition of all temporal events.
Shall space and time, then, be set down as fictions of
the intellect? That equally is impossible without
destroying the whole edifice of knowledge. For

FAITHS OF SCIEXCE. 137

their existence is involved in the existence of every
object and property of the actual world.

The existence of what is immaterial seems to be
involved, again, in any satisfactory explanation of
the dynamics of Nature. How, for example, if we
suppose no other kind of force in existence than that
which is a property of material objects and seated in
them, can the attraction of gravitation, cohesion and
adhesion, the repulsion of heat, the occurrence of
both attractive and repulsive forces in magnetism
and electricity, be explained ? Immense voids sepa-
rate planet from planet, star from star. Yet the
force of gravitation almost instantly passes from one
to the other. Great intervals may separate two
electric currents, or a magnet from a magnetic body ;
and yet the electric or magnetic force will act from
one to the other. For example, it is now considered
proved that the sun acts upon the earth as a magnet.
Even between molecule and molecule similar inter-
spaces exist. In the hardest of substances, the scien-
tific men tell us, the molecules are not in contact with
their neighboring molecules. "Were they so, bodies
would be absolutely incompressible. The fact is,
however, that there is no body that is not more or
less compressible. Those that are but slightly com-
pressible by the most powerful mechanical means,
contract or interpenetrate under the force of chemi-
cal affinity. Sulphuric acid and water, though not
sensibly yielding to pressure, yet, when mixed, give
a resulting volume considerably less than the aggre-

138 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

gate volume of the two liquids used. According to
Faraday we may cast into potassium its equivalent
of oxygen, and again both oxygen and hydrogen in
a twofold number of atoms, and yet, with all these
additions, the matter shall become less and less till
it is not two-thirds of its original volume. A space
which would be filled by four hundred and thirty
atoms of potassium may thus be made to contain
seven hundred of potassium and twenty-one hundred
of oxygen and hydrogen.

Such experiments make it evident that consider-
able interspaces separate even the nearest atoms.
Now, if there be no force except that which is a
quality of some material body, and seated in it, how
can these various forms pass beyond the periphery
of their respective material seats, traverse these void
spaces, and act upon other bodies at a distance ?

Is it conceivable that a material body can, through
its strictly material force, act where it does not exist,
or where no medium intervenes through which to
transmit its force ? Let the great discoverer of
gravitation answer. " It is inconceivable," says
Newton, in a celebrated passage of his letter to
Bentley, " that inanimate brute matter should, with-
out the mediation of something else, which is not
material, operate upon and affect other matter with-
out mutual contact. . . . That gravity should be in-
nate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one
body may act upon another through a vacuum, with-
out the mediation of any thing else, by and through

FAITHS OF SCIEXCR 139

which their action and force may be conveyed from
one to the other, is to me so great an absurdity that
I believe no man, who in philosophical matters has
a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into
it."

Or, if more modern authority is desired, the re-
cent and weighty words of Prof. Challis 1 and Prof.
Maxwell may be quoted :

tJ There is no other kind of force than pressure
by contact of one body with another. . . . I'he rule
of philosophy which makes personal sensation and
experience the basis of scientific knowledge . . .
forbids recognizing any other mode of moving a
body than this. When, therefore, a body is caused
to move without apparent contact and pressure of
another body, it must still be concluded that the
pressing body, although invisible, exists, unless we
are prepared to admit that there are physical opera-
tions which are and ever will be incomprehensible
to us. . . . All physical force being pressure, there
must be a medium by which the pressure is exerted."

" If something," says Prof. Clerk Maxwell,2 " is
transmitted from one particle to another at a dis-
tance, what is its condition after it has left the one
particle and before it has reached the other ? If this
something is the potential energy of the two parti-
cles, how are we to conceive this energy as existing
in a point of space coinciding neither with the one

1 Philosophical Magazine, vol. xxxii., § 4, p. 46*7.

2 " Electricity and Magnetism," vol. ii., p. 437.

l-±0 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

particle nor the other? In fact, whenever energy
is transmitted from one body to another in time,
there must be a medium or substance in which the
energy exists."

Suppose, then, in order that we may interpret
gravitation and the other attractive forces as ma-
terial forces, we boldly diffuse through all the vast
regions where they are displayed, between star and
star, between molecule and molecule, an invisible
intervening medium, bathing them on all sides, and
pressing them one toward another. Suppose we say,
as Prof. Challis does, that the luminous ether pre-
sents to us, as actually existing, such an omnipresent,
ever-pressing medium, and that the vibratory motion
of atoms or larger material bodies in the midst of
this sea of ether is sufficient, in accordance with
Prof. Guthrie's famous experiments, and Sir William
Thomson's calculations, to direct the ethereal press-
ure upon gravitative, cohesive, or magnetic centres.
Still the difficulty is not overcome. To interpret
gravitation thus, as transmission of pressure through
the luminiferous ether, seems inconsistent with the
instant, or almost instant, action of gravitation
through the greatest distances. The velocity of
light through the ether, though exceedingly swift,
yet occupies quite an appreciable time — several min-
utes in passing from planet to planet, and years in
going from star to star. But the velocity of gravi-
tation, if any finite measure can be given to it, is at
least, according to Laplace's calculations, fifty mill

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 141

ion times that of light. Moreover, if attraction be
a result of ethereal pressure, what is there without
the ether to press it thus ever inward ? or, if there
is nothing, what prevents it, as Sir John Herschel
asked, from expanding into infinite space, and losing
itself there? Is it conceivable that this ether, any
more than other matter, should be free from all
discontinuity, all division into constituent parts and
intervals between them ? If not, then the existence
of such an unbroken, continuous substance, penetrat-
ing all bodies and filling all the interstices of grosser
matter, and acting as the transmitting medium to
the forces of bodies, ought to make all solids and
liquids transparent to light, heat, and electricity.
Such a medium ought not, at least, to be both a con-
ductor and a non-conductor of electricity, both trans-
parent and opaque to light, both a heat-transmitter
and a heat-absorbent.

Again, if the ether has no void spaces anywhere
in it, then it must absolutely fill space full. How,
then, is any of that motion of which all Mature is
full, and which the materialists tell us constitutes
all varieties of force, possible ? If a body is to move
with momentum, so as to give a shock, there must
be space for it to move through. Before it can
move at all, there must be a free space for it to
move into. If it pushes weaker matter away to
make room for itself, then there must be free space
for that weaker matter to move into. If all space
be already full, motion is impossible. Theoretically,

142 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

then, the ether cannot be destitute of void intervals
between its parts ; and, in point of fact, physicists
regard it, like all other matter, as composed of its
separate ethereal atoms, situated at distances which,
in proportion to the size of the ether-atom, are fully
as great as, if not vastly greater than, the intervals oi
common matter. Subtile, then, as is the hypothesis
of an omnipresent ethereal medium, pressing all
matter together, the difficulty of action at a distance
remains undiminished.

If the leaping of force over the ninety-two mill-
ion miles of celestial space that separates the sun from
the earth requires either an intervening medium
through which it may act, or some other interpreta-
tion of it than as transmission of material motion or
pressure or other quality seated in matter, equally
does the passage over the minutest atomic interval ;
and, as we cannot go on forever imagining finer
and finer media — as we must somewhere leave the
room that will give opportunity for motion — ought
we not frankly to accept the opposite alternative —
the acceptance of force as something capable of act-
ing, and therefore existing where matter does not
exist, as, in fine, an immaterial principle ?

Perhaps it may be said that Le Sage's famous
hypothesis, which Sir William Thomson recently re-
suscitated, is sufficient'to explain gravitation and all
other kinds of attractive force without supposing
any thing else than motions and qualities of matter.
This hypothesis supposes that an infinity of atoms

FAITHS OF SCIEXCE. 143

fly with excessive velocity through all mundane
regions, inward bound from the immensity of ultra-
mundane space. Ceaselessly pelting all objects on
all sides, the result is that any two objects at a cer-
tain distance apart will, in reference to each other,
be mutually screened from this bombardment on the
faces looking toward each other, and will thus be
reciprocally attracted. This is certainly the boldest,
the most ingenious, the most purely mechanical of
all explanations of attractive force. But, leaving
unnoticed its pure hypotheticalness and transcend-
ence of all possible experience, this theory but re-
moves its difficulties to other points. Whence is
derived this celestial storm? We must go outside
the world of stars for that. On this theory, as on
that of Challis,1 " the universe is not even tempora-
rily automatic, but must be fed from moment to
moment by an agency external to itself." The
drawing together of bodies may possibly be ex-
plained by the pressure of such an atomic hailstorm ;
but it presents no explanation of what is equally in-
consistent with any interpretation of force as a trans-
mission of material motion or pressure, namely, the
repulsive powers exhibited by gases, and by solids
and fluids when heated, magnetized, or electrified.
Moreover, it brings us squarely up against another
form of physical force, explicable only as an imma-
terial principle. I mean the force of elasticity. If
•these invisible pelting atoms be hard and inelastic^

1 American Journal of Science and Arts, October, 1874, p. 306.

144 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

then every time they strike a body they must lose
some of their energy. As Sir John Herschel ' says,
" in the collision of inelastic bodies, vis viva is ne-
cessarily and invariably destroyed. . . . Taking such
a system in its entirety (where force exists not), there
is no possibility of its reproduction. . . . Such an
arrangement must of necessity be rapidly self -de-
structive, and must result in the gradual but speedy
dying away of all relative motion."

In order, then, that the system of Nature be
conceived as permanent, in order that our theory
may harmonize with the observed constancy of the
physical forces, the atoms must be capable of so re-
bounding that after a collision thev shall have the
same velocity as before. This Sir William Thomson
perceived, and in his reconstruction of Le Sage's
theory employed as materials, not hard atoms, but
molecules of perfect elasticity.

But whence is this elasticity obtained, and what
is the nature of elastic force % This is an inquiry,
important not only in this connection, but for any
adequate explanation of all those numerous phenom-
ena, in solids, in fluids, especially in gases, in which
elasticity is involved. Take a gas, for example,
which presses on all sides upon the envelope con-
taining it. The mechanical explanation of this is,
that the gas is constituted of material particles which
move in all possible directions, each in a right line,
and which change direction without change of ve-

i <<

Familiar Lectures," pp. 465, 466.

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 145

locity where they meet a fixed obstacle. The press-
ure of the gas is due to the shocks of the gaseous
molecules against the containing walls. JNow, such
an inclosed gas, if left in an hermetical vessel, does
not gradually lose its force of pressure till it be-
comes nothing, but retains it undiminished. This
simple fact implies that the gaseous molecules, when
they strike their containing walls or collide with one
another, as they are continually doing, rebound with
the same velocity with which they struck. We say
this is because the gaseous molecules possess elastic
force, and imagine the matter explained. But let
us follow out in thought the course of a molecule
when it strikes an obstacle and rebounds, and we
may not, perhaps, be so easily satisfied. First, upon
the occurrence of a collision, the molecule loses all
its own velocity, it comes to a dead halt for an infi-
nitely short instant, and then it regains an equal ve-
locity in a contrary direction. We see, then, that to
effect this, there must be something which is capa-
ble, first, of destroying established movement ; then,
when the body has been brought to a state of repose,
starting it again with a velocity equal to what it had
before. What, then, is the nature of this something,
possessed of so great and unique a power ? Does it
reside in the material atom as one of its properties ?
Let us compress our gas, observe the relation of its
temperature under compression to the degree of
compression, and we shall have a crucial test which
will tell us whether the material atoms are elastic
7

146 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

and variable in volume or not. If the atoms them-
selves are elastic and variable in volume, then the
gas, the sum of them, may be compressed without
increasing the atomic motion, that is, the heat in the
gas ; and after compression the atoms may expand
without requiring any expenditure of atomic motion
or thermal energy. But if the atoms be not them-
selves elastic or variable in volume, then compression
of the gas signifies a lessening of the atomic inter-
vals, and consequently a greater atomic velocity or
heat, and the reexpansion of the gas would require
the expenditure again of this atomic motion to re-
store the atoms to their previous stations.

The opposite results of the two hypotheses are
then clear. Equally clear is the decisive auswer of
all thermodynamical experiments, that there is no
compression without a corresponding production of
heat, and no expansion of a compressed body against
pressure without the expenditure of heat. The
whole science of thermodynamics rests on the defi-
nite and constant correlation of work and heat, and
is incompatible with variability of volume in the
atoms.1

Can the elastic rebound, then, be the result in
each case of some anterior motion, in accordance
with the view of these pure materialists who would
hold as a first law, " no motion without anterior
motion ? " The sufficient answer is that, in the case

1 See " Consequences de la Thermodynamique," par G. A. Him,
p. 208.

FAITHS OF SCIEXCE. 147

of the elastic rebound, the resilient motion is sepa-
rated from all previous motion by an instant, infinite-
ly short, perhaps, but still an actual instant of rest,
during which the direction of movement is reversed.
The difficulty cannot be escaped.

Suppose, even, we- say that the atom, like an
ivory ball, changes its form upon collision with an
object, that it is composed of component parts, and
that an internal vibratory movement of them is set
up, in consequence of which the atom first seeks to
regain its old form, and next, this internal motion,
passing into translatory motion, the whole atom re-
bounds— the difficulty is only transferred from the
whole atom to the component particles or atoms of
the atom. "Whence the tendency of one of these
particles to return to its place ? What is the force
that, when it has swung to its farthest limit and
stops then for its infinitesimal second of rest, starts it
from rest into motion ? jSTo anterior motion can
explain this, for between the anterior and the pos-
terior motion is always this intervening moment of
rest.1

If, as Du Bois-Keymond says, and as is logically
required by the very conception of it, " the proper-
ties of matter can neither be extended outside of
itself nor transferred to other material objects,"
then they are plainly unequal to explaining the phe-
nomena of elasticity as well as those of attraction

1 " Consequences de la Thermodynamique," par G. A. Hirn,
livre ii., chapitre i.

14S PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

and repulsion. To explain adequately these funda-
mental, constant, and ubiquitous properties of Na-
ture, we must conceive force, not as the materialists
tell us we can alone properly conceive it, as " the
property inseparable from and eternally inherent in
matter," as " a motion arising from some previous
motion and acting through bodily contact or inter-
vening medium," but as the very reverse of that —
as a power which does not depend on anterior mo-
tion, which can exist and act where no material me-
dium is present — in short, as an immaterial principle.
But if Science can find explanation of many of its
most fundamental phenomena only in such a prin-
ciple, why should it be called " a speculative fable '
when presented by the religious thinker ? If even
in physical relations the difficulties in getting along
without supposing the immaterial are greater than
the difficulty of supposing it, why in spiritual rela-
tions, also, may not it be credited as being some-
thing more than " naught ?"

But the beliefs of religion, it will be replied, are
directed to that which it is not merely difficult to
know, but which it is impossible to know — some-
thing which is absolutely inconceivable. All our
knowledge is relative, that is, a knowledge of a
thing through its relations and contrasts with some-
thing else. How, then, can we know the Absolute,
the One Supreme, existing in and by himself ? All
our knowledge is of appearances and through the
senses. How, then, can we know that which is said

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 149

to lie beyond appearances, and is certainly inacces-
sible to the senses — spirit \

Man, and all that belongs to him, is finite. He
passes his few fleeting days, indeed, as a pigmy, in
a little corner of the universe. Even in his bright-
est achievements his powers are narrowly limited.
There is nothing infinite either in his experi-
ences or in his nature. How, then, can he conceive
the Infinite ? If, even in imagination, he seek to
follow out any mode of the infinite, he ever falls
short — no matter how immense his mental flight —
within the bounds of the finite. Were it possible to
follow through in thought an infinite whole, an infi-
nite time would be required for the operation.
Theologians may talk glibly of soul and over-soul,
creator and creation, absolute and infinite ; they
may fancy that they understand them ; but they are
only deceiving themselves, mistaking familiarity
with words for a genuine understanding of things.
Their high-sounding terms are but covers to their
real ignorance. The realities themselves, if there
are realities here, are mysteries beyond all compre-
hension. The endeavor to conceive of any of them
is, as Strauss says of the idea of a Creator, but
" merely dealing with an idle phantasy." This is
no trumped-up objection, due to the envy of Science.
It is a difficulty which metaphysicians and theologi-
ans themselves have recognized and stated, a diffi-
culty which beset the path of the most ancient
thinkers, which has been affirmed by the acutest

150 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

intellects of modern times, such as Pascal, Kant,
Hamilton, and Mansel, and which is fatal to the
claims of religion. Yalid knowledge is to be found
only by confining ourselves strictly to that realm
to which Science limits herself — the realm of the
conceivable, that is, of the relative and the phenom-
enal.

Let us see how this is. It is, indeed, the com-
mon aim of Science to keep within the field, not of
phenomena, for we have seen that its highest tri-
umphs are in the regions above phenomena, but of
that which can be readily demonstrated and verified,
and which can be clearly comprehended. And su-
perficial observers, who notice only the exactness of
its measurements, the constancy and regularity of its
laws, the rigor of its demonstrations, generally fancy
it a realm absolutely free from all mysteries. But
the genuine savant, who is not content with the regis-
tration of facts, but would know what at bottom is
their significance and explanation, knows science to
be a region of very different character, full of puz-
zling perplexities and marvelous hypotheses, thick
set with dilemmas that land him in the inconceiv-
able, and with problems that have to be given up as
insoluble. " If you wish to be initiated into the
interior of physics," says Xovalis, " you must be
initiated into the mysteries of poetry." ~No flight
of dramatist's fancy is wilder than some of the
sober theories of mathematicians. And, the more
we investigate Nature, the more miracles we find

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 151

before our eyes. As Stanley Jevons ' well says :
" Scientific method must begin and end with the
laws of thought, but it does not follow that it will
save us from encountering inexplicable, and, at
least, apparently contradictory results. . . . Science
does nothing to reduce the number of strange things
that we may believe. When fairly pursued it makes
large drafts upon our powers of comprehension and
belief."

There is no force, for example, better established
scientifically than the force of gravity. Yet it in-
volves the greatest inconceivabilities. It possesses,
in the first place, a velocity almost, if not actually,
instantaneous. It must act through vacuous space ;
if not vacuous interstellar space, yet vacuous atomic
intervals. Not only does it thus act where there is
no intervening medium, but, more perplexing still,
in perfect indifference to all intervening obstacles.
Light, in spite of its velocity and the etherealness
of its medium, is either stopped or deflected, more
or less, by almost every substance ; but all media
are to gravity perfectly transparent ; nothing is able
either to reflect, refract, or absorb it ; and two points
on opposite sides of the globe attract each other as
if there were absolutely nothing between them.

Again, gravitation, as Faraday has shown,2 is at

1 " Principles of Science," vol. ii., pp. 466, 467.

2 See Faraday's paper on the " Conservation of Force," pp. 364,
366, 368, " Correlation and Conservation of Forces," edited by E.
L. Youmans, M. D.

152 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

odds with the fundamental doctrine of the conser-
vation of energy, and also with that of inertia. The
received idea of gravity as a simple attractive force
between any two or all the particles or masses, at
every sensible distance, with a strength varying in-
versely as the square of the distance, appears to
Faraday to involve inconceivable inconsistencies. In
the case of the diminution of the distance, say to
one-tenth, and the consequent increase of the force
a hundred-fold, it implies an actual creation of force,
and that to an enormous extent ; and in the reverse
case, where the distance is increased tenfold and the
power diminished to a hundredth of its previous
amount, it implies an actual annihilation of force ;
effects requiring the intervention of Infinite Crea-
tive Power.

Again, the current idea of gravity supposes that
a single isolated particle would have no gravitative
force, but that, the moment another single particle
(which by itself is also without gravitative force) is
placed in relation to it, gravitative force springs up
in both particles. This also implies the creation
of force and the impossible consequences already
referred to.

Again, if we consider the mutual gravitating ac-
tion of one particle and of many, the particle A
will attract the particle B at the distance of a mile
with a certain degree of force ; it will attract a par-
ticle C at the same distance of a mile with an equal
power ; if myriads of like particles be placed at

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 153

the given distance, A will attract each with equal
force ; and if other particles be accumulated around
it within the sphere, two miles in diameter, it will
attract them all with a force varying inversely with
the square of the distance. How are we to con-
ceive of this force growing up in A to a million-
fold or more, and, if the surrounding particles be
then removed, of its diminution in an equal degree,
without admitting, according to the received defini-
tion of gravitation, the facile generation and annihi-
lation of force %

Or, if we take into consideration that property
of matter which is, perhaps, its most characteristic
property, that of inertia, we add still more to our
difficulty. When two particles of matter, at cer-
tain distances apart, attract each other and approach,
each, through that inertia, will store up a certain
amount of mechanical force, due to the force exert-
ed. According to the doctrine of conservation, an
equivalent portion of the cause of attraction must
be thereby consumed ; and yet, according to the law
of gravity, the attractive force is not diminished,
but increased inversely to the square of the distance.
Conversely, if mechanical force from without be
used to separate the particles, this force is not stored
up by inertia, but disappears ; and, when bodies
have been moved to double the distance, the force
is only one-fourth as great.

If gravity is a property of matter, and possessed
of its inertia, these results are truly inconceivable ;

154: PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

and if we regard it, as has been urged, as an imma-
terial principle, then either an equal inconceivability
is believed by Science, or Science grants the funda-
mental position of Religion — the existence and
credibility of the immaterial.

Or, take the undulatory theory of light — another
of the greatest triumphs of Science — and what men-
tal stumbling-blocks present themselves ! We are
asked to believe that the infinitely greater bulk of
matter in the universe is radically different from
that portion of it which comes under the observa-
tion of our senses, and makes up the globe we live
on ; we are asked, that is, to violate the scientific
principles of continuity, and of judging the un-
known by the known. AVe are asked, again, to be-
lieve that all the molecular and interstellar spaces,
though they seem to be empty, are filled with a me-
dium whose pressure, as before was noted, is cal-
culated at seventeen billion pounds upon every
square inch. Though thus immensely more elastic
and solid than steel, it cannot be weighed nor seen,
and we move through it without the least pressure
from it. A gaseous medium, like air, strongly re-
sists the flight thr ought it of any swiftly-moving
body ; but the immense pressure of this medium has
apparently little or no retarding effect either upon
the larger bodies or the minute atoms constantly
moving in it. The most that has ever been attrib-
uted to it is a slight retardation of one or two of
those most feeble and unsubstantial of bodies, the

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 155

comets. But, if the ether behaves according to the
universal laws of matter, it is impossible for bodies
like the planets or the atoms to move themselves
through iis dense substance without the expenditure
of force in pushing it aside, and, as an inevitable
result, a continual decrease of all cosmical motion.
But if, nevertheless, we imagine, as bold physicists
have done, that the ether is exempt from this law,
and suppose that it is frictionless — planets and at-
oms swinging in it without loss of motion — then we
are involved in an equal difficulty ; for, as the ether
takes no motion from the bodies moving in it, it
consequently cannot impart nor transmit any motion
to other bodies, and the whole use of the ether, and
the necessity for supposing it as the medium for
transmitting light and heat, disappears.

Such are the inconceivabilities and contradictions
which we plunge into in the study of just two spe-
cial points in scientific investigation. If we were to
examine, in turn, the various departments of physi-
cal knowledge, we should find everywhere only
similar results.

Leaving particular difficulties, let us, then, in-
quire into that which is the seat of all physical
force, the subject of investigation in all depart-
ments of Science — matter itself in general. It is
matter and its qualities, we are told, that explain
every thing. What, then, is this " matter ? ': "We
generally understand by it the common substance
of all bodies. Bodies have many qualities ; but

156 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

the two qualities common to all bodies are volume
and force. Considering the volume, or the extension
of matter, the question arises, Is that divisible or in-
divisible ? Down to the primary atom, it is univer-
sally conceded to be divisible ; then comes a dilem-
ma. If we say it is indivisible, that is something
irreconcilable with its possessing volume or extent ;
for, however infinitesimally small, as long as it has
any volume, it must have an under and an upper, a
right or a left, side between which a division is con-
ceivable. If the atom is not divisible, it cannot be
extended, and hence cannot, by any aggregation of
such unextended atoms, make an extended bodv.
On the other hand, if we say, as Buchner does, that
matter is divisible ad infinitum, then we can never
arrive at what constitutes the reality of it ; for, as
long as a thing is divisible, it is a compound, and
a compound has no reality except that of its com-
ponent parts ; and as no portion can be found, not
composed of smaller parts, we shall never succeed
in arriving at the ultimate element which alone can
give reality to the aggregate. Moreover, as the pro-
cess of division in search of the ultimate parts of
matter has to be carried on beyond any finite limit,
those ultimate parts must be less than any finite ex-
tension, and the former difficulty again occurs, How
can they make up an extended aggregate ? '

Again, if we consider the question of the con-

1 See Janet's " Materialism of the Present Age," translated by
Gustave Masson, p. 45.

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 15 7

tinuity of matter, we fall into similar dilemmas. If
matter be continuous throughout all space, atom in
contact with atom, then all differences of density,
all expansion or compression, all motion, even, ex-
cept such as that of Descartes's supposed vortices, is
impossible. On the other hand, if matter be dis-
continuous, then we must either believe the incon-
ceivability that matter can act where it is not, or we
must suppose the force that passes through the void
spaces of matter is not inseparable from matter :
that is, we must grant the postulate of Religion — the
existence and action of the immaterial.

Taking up, next, the other main element in the
.idea of matter, its force, and endeavoring to fol-
low it out to its logical result, the scientific analyst
finds another dead-wall to bruise his head. Is mat-
ter conceivably preexistent to force, and really inde-
pendent of it, though practically revealing itself
only through it ? So some seem to think. But
just imagine matter separate from force, and what
remains of it \ Nothing but extension, as Janet 1
has well pointed out. How, then, is matter in itself
distinguished from space? How can a portion of
matter be discriminated from the portion of space
corresponding to it % In no wise. Suppose, then,
we take the other horn of the dilemma — say that
force is the inherent quality of matter, not even in
thought to be separated from it. The difference of
a portion of matter from the space it occupies is

1 " Materialism of the Present Day," p. 47.

15S PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

now plain. It differs in its force. But as this is
the only thing it differs in — as force is the only
other factor besides extension always entering into
it — is not this saying just what the opponents of
materialism have always urged, namely, that matter
really consists in simple force, located in space, and
that the conception of a thing besides, called matter,
was superfluous j " What do we know of an atom
apart from its force ? ' is the pertinent question of
Faraday. " You conceive a nucleus that may be
called a, and you surround it with forces that may
be called m. To my mind, your a or nucleus van-
ishes, and substance consists in the energy of ra."

There are, it is true, perhaps the scientist will
say, many things which we believe without yet un-
derstanding them, but we look forward to in time.
But the mysteries of religion, involving as they do
the notions of infinity and self-existence, are abso-
lute mysteries, not merely now incomprehensible,
but from our constitution as finite beings always to
remain so. I do not care here to discuss this ques-
tion of the knowability or conceivability of the Infi-
nite. Were I to do so, I believe that it would
be easy to show that this supposed difficulty is
entirely due to certain common confusions of thought
and ambiguities of language. That which is incon-
ceivable, because of its contradiction to the laws of
thought, is certainly unbelievable. But that which
is inconceivable only by its overpassing the limits
of our powers is not, therefore, to be thought non-

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 159

existent. That which is unpicturable to the imagi-
nation may jet be thinkable by the reason. That
which we cannot know in essence we may yet know
in its attributes and relations. That which we can-
not know completely we may yet know not inade-
quately and not untruly. The infinitude of an ob-
ject in quantitative respects does not make it un-
knowable in its qualitative attributes.1 Spiritual
things are not graded by magnitude, but by perfec-
tion.

If we bear these distinctions in mind, we shall
not be troubled, I believe, by the alleged incon-
ceivability of the infinite. But whether or not the
infinite is conceivable or knowable, the fact remains
— which I especially desire here to call attention
to — that science continually employs the conception
of the infinite, without hesitation, and builds with
it many of its proudest structures. In mathematical
calculations it is continually employed without dis-
trust. In geometry and mechanics the idea of the

1 A cylinder prolonged to infinity does not cease to be a cylinder
or become unknowable. Infinite space is still space, has the capaci-
ty of holding extended objects, and the same three dimensions —
length, breadth, and thickness. As Lewes justly says, laying it
down as an important formula : " The existence of an unknown
quantity does not necessarily disturb the accuracy of calculations
founded on the known functions of the quantity."

Thus, to give his illustration, although we may be unable to an-
swer the question, " What is the value of V x added to 5 a;/ " so
long as x remains without an assigned or assignable value, we are
absolutely certain that the result will be 12 x, whatever value x may
have.

100 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

infinite plays an indispensable role. The concep-
tions of the line, the circle, and the sphere, are in-
conceivable except through conceptions of the in-
finitely small. So in mechanics, the passage from
the axioms of uniform motion to other forms of
motion is made by the assumption of uniform mo-
tion through infinitesimal intervals. Astronomy
and geology, on the other hand, lead us to the cor-
relative infinitude, the infinitely large. As the tele-
scope penetrates into space it brings to us inevitably
the question, "Is there a limit anywhere to space?''
That there should be a limit to space, a boundary
beyond which there should be no opportunity for
existence, is certainly unthinkable ; but, if so, we
must accept the infinity of pace with whatever in-
conceivableness properly belongs to it. As the geol-
ogist traces back the historv of the world, he runs
athwart similar dilemmas attaching to time and
matter. It is unthinkable that time should have a
limit beyond which there would be no possibility of
duration or succession. But if not, then infinite
time, with its opposite inconceivability, must be ac-
cepted. It is inconceivable that matter should have
come into existence out of nothing. But the only
alternative is the equal inconceivability, that matter
has existed from all eternity. If theologians, with
their ideas of creation, are guilty of believing in the
first members of these pairs of inconceivables, those
who reject it must accept the second. In point of
fact they are quite generally accepted by the scien-

FAITHS OF SCIEXCE. 161

tific world. Mr. Proctor, in his lecture upon the
"Infinities around us,"1 bears testimony to the ac-
ceptance by the astronomer of infinity of power,
infinity of space, and infinity of time in the uni-
verse. Especially do those who belong to the ma-
terialistic school, and find the ideas of theism incon-
ceivable, make without scruple the most confident
affirmations of infinity. Strauss,2 for example, de-
clares that, "if we contemplate the universe as a
whole, there never has been a time when it did not
exist, .... the cosmos itself, the sum total of in-
finite worlds in all stages of growth and decay,
abode eternally unchanged, in the constancy of its
absolute energy, amid the everlasting revolution and
mutation of things." Yogt and Biichner 3 lay down,
as fundamental principles of their system, the eter-
nity of matter and the immortality of force.

Prof. Haeckel, of Jena, whose book, " Generelle
Morphologie cler Organismen," has been called "the
Bible of Darwinism," says of the theory of creation
(book ii., chapter vi., sec. 2): "The acceptation of
this is quite incompatible with one of the first and
chiefest of Nature's laws, one, indeed, universally
acknowledged — namely, with the great law that all
matter is eternal"

Even Herbert Spencer falls into the same pit.
Though he has branded all ideas which involve infi-

1 Tribune Extra, No. 15.

2 "The Old Faith and the New," pp. 173, 174, American edition.
8 See " Force and Matter," chapters ii. and iii.

162 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

nite self -existence as "pseudo-ideas," and consequent-
ly condemned all forms of theism, pantheism, and
materialism, as inevitably involving such inconceiva-
bilities,1 no sooner has he put theology, as he thinks,
Tiors cle comhat, and gone on to his positive scientific
construction, than he tells us that matter was both
uncreated and is indestructible, and that force al-
ways persists in unchanged quantity,2 ideas neces-
sarily involving infinite duration both in the past
and in the future. Yet if the infinite is an incon-
ceivable thing, a pseudo-idea, a symbolic conception
of the illegitimate order, what saves these scientific
conceptions from vitiation by it ? AVhen the wariest
thinker is driven by continual dilemmas into accept-
ing; inconceivabilitv either on one side or the other,
" why then," as Proctor asks, " dismiss the idea of
a God merely because he is beyond our powers
of conception ? " The principle on which religion
reasons up to the infinite is not different from that
employed by the mathematician, the geometer, or
the astronomer, for the same purpose. It is, in fact,
the same, the peculiar and fundamental conception
of a limit, "the use of which," in proving the
propositions of the higher geometry, Whewell says,
" cannot be superseded by any combination of hy-
potheses and definitions."

" This principle of a limit," continues Whewell,
" leads to all the results which form the subject of

1 " First Principles," Part I., chapters ii. and iv.

2 Ibid., Part II., chapters iv. and vi.

FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 1(JS

the higher mathematics, whether proved by the con-
sideration of evanescent triangles, by the processes
of the differential calculus, or in any other way."
In fact it is " when such processes as JSTewton de-
duced from the conception of a limit are represented
by general algebraical symbols, instead of geomet-
rical diagrams," that " we have then before us the
method of fluxions, or the differential calculus, a
method of treating mathematical problems justly
considered as the principal weapon by which the
splendid triumphs of modern mathematics have been
achieved." '

The axiom which rules in all these processes is
simply that " what is true up to a limit is true at
that limit." Applying this to the limit of infinity,
it gives us the rule that what is true throughout all
finite grades, up to the infinite, is true at the infi-
nite. What better vindication from science could
theology desire for its constant claim that the qual-
ities of justice, love, wisdom, and holiness, mani-
fested throughout the finite and phenomenal scale,
shining out the more clearly the higher the grade of
being, must exist in the infinite reality above and
behind the finite phenomena ; and that, moreover,
this infinite justice, love, and holiness, is not per-
haps radically different from its finite manifesta-
tions, but, however immensely greater and more
perfect, is essentially the same %

1 Whewell's "History of Scientific Ideas," vol. i., pp. 152, 158,

164 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

CHAPTER YL

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. THEIR UNCERTAINTY, INEXACT-
NESS, AND VARIABILITY.

There is still one other difference often insisted
upon as justifying a difference in the comparative
credit given to science and religion — the difference
of results.

Though religion may perhaps use the same meth-
ods as science and aim at no more transcendental
objects, yet, in practice, it is charged that she is never
able to reach the exactness and the certainty for
which science is distinguished. When science once
puts her foot down, she never draws back. The
received truths and forms of religion, on the other
hand, are continually shifting. Its early phases
were often gross and full of errors. Neither moral-
ity nor faith has any absolute standard, any unre-
treating course.

Again I answer, these are charges to which
science as well as religion lies open. Xt> difference
exists here sufficient to justify contempt or disregard
for religion on the part of scientific men, or those
who accept current scientific doctrines and results.

No instance of sense observation is entirely ex-

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 165

empt from the possibility of error or delusion. As
has been already noticed, every sense has its limits,
beyond which it fails either to discriminate or to
perceive at all. Unusual conditions of observation
cause mistakes in perception. Cross the fingers, and,
while the eyes are shut, put a cherry between the sides
usually separated, and two cherries, instead of one
cherry, are felt. A torch whirled rapidly, or drops of
water falling swiftly, seem to form a continuous line,
the separate impressions running into each other.
AVithout surveying the particular defects of all the
senses, it will be sufficient to look at that sense
which is most wonderful and perfect — vision. Its
perfection is not absolute, but merely practical.

Prof. Helmholtz, in his lecture on " The Recent
Progress of the Theory of Vision," gives a cata-
logue of some of the principal defects of the eye :

1. Chromatic aberration.

2. Spherical aberration and defective centring
of the cornea and lens, together with the first de-
fect, producing the imperfection known "as astig-
matism.

3. Irregular radiation around the images of illu-
minated points.

Helmholtz considers these defects so grave that
he declares that " it is not too much to say that, if
an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which
had all these defects, I should- think myself quite
justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest
terms, and giving him back his instrument."

166 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

He then goes on to other faults :

4. Defective transparency.

5. Floating corpuscles (muscce volitantes).

6. The blind spot, with other gaps in the field
of vision.

But this is not all. " The inaccuracies and im7
perfections of the eye, as an optical instrument,
and those which belong to the image on the retina,
now appear insignificant in comparison with the in-
congruities which we have met with in the field of
sensation. One might almost believe that Nature
had here contradicted herself on purpose, in order
to destroy any dream of a preexisting harmony
between the outer and the inner world. . . .

" In general, then, light, which consists of undu-
lations of different wave-lengths, produces different
impressions upon our eye, namely, those of different
colors. But the number of lines which we can recog-
nize is much smaller than that of the various possible
combinations of rays with different wave-lengths
which external objects can convey to our eyes. The
retina cannot distinguish between the white which is
produced by the union of scarlet and bluish-green
light, and that which is composed of yellowish-green
and violet, or of yellow and ultra-marine blue, or of
red, green, and violet, or of all the colors of the spec-
trum united. All these combinations appear iden-
tically as white, and yet, from a physical point of
view, they are very different."

Again, the eye cannot correctly estimate the com-

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 167

parative brightness of two luminous bodies which
differ very much in brilliancy, for we know that the
eye is constantly adjusting itself to the intensity of
the light received, and thus admits more or less light
according to circumstances. The moon, so bright
at night, is pale and nearly imperceptible while the
eye is yet affected by the vastly more powerful light
of day. For this reason it is difficult to estimate
any change in the form or comparative brightness
of nebulae, or of the zodiacal light. The appear-
ance depends greatly on the varying darkness of the
night and the keenness of sight of the observer, or
the freshness or fatigue of the eye. In judging of
colors, again, there is a difficulty arising from the
fact that light of a given color tends to dull the
sensibility of the eye for light of the same color.

N o one has given a more compact catalogue of
ways in which the senses are found insufficient than
Lord Bacon in the " Xovum Organum." " Things
escape the senses," he says, " because the object is
not sufficient in quantity to strike the senses, as all
minute bodies ; because the percussion of the body
is too great to be endured by the senses, as the
form of the sun, when looking directly at it in mid-
day ; because the time is not proportionate to actuate
the sense, as the motion of a bullet in the air, or
the quick, circular motions of a firebrand which are
too fast, or the hour-hand of a common clock, which
is too slow ; from the distance of the object as to
place, as the size of the celestial bodies, and the

1 6 S PHYSICAL AND RELIGIO US KXO WLED GE.

size and nature of all distant bodies ; from prepos-
session by another object, as one powerful smell
renders other smells in the same room impercepti-
ble; from the interruption of opposing bodies, as
the internal parts of animals ; and because the ob-
ject is unfit to make an impression upon the sense,
as the air, or the invisible or untangible spirit which
is included in every living body."

Moreover, besides these bodily hinderances to
correct observation, there are the mental hinderances.
Even when the utmost care is used in observing and
recording, tendencies to error exist. Almost every
observer has a bias that affects, more or less, his ob-
servations. The mind of man, as Bacon said, is an
uneven mirror, and does not reflect the events of
Nature without distortion.

Again, there may be circumstances connected
with the object observed which may tend to dis-
tort it or cause us to observe it one-sidedly.- There
is always, for example, a prevailing fallacy, that our
ancestors built more strongly than we do, arising
from the fact that the more fragile structures have
long since melted away. Prof. De Morgan has
mentioned four ways in which one event may seem
to follow, or be connected with another, without
really being so.1

In consequence of these hinderances and pitfalls,
the various sciences will lack more or less of the
certainty commonly attributed to them. None have

1 See "Essay on Probabilities," Cabinet Cyclopaedia, p. 121.

SCIEXTIFIC RESULTS. 169

done more to show this than the men of science
themselves. Dr. W. B. Carpenter, speaking of the
general belief that the scientific interpretation of
Nature represents her not merely as she seems, but
as she really is, says : " When, however, we care-
full v examine the foundation of that assurance, we
find reason to distrust its 'security, for it can be
shown to be no less true of the scientific conception
of Nature than it is of the artistic or poetic that it
is a representation framed by the mind itself out of
the material supplied by the impressions which ex-
ternal objects make upon the senses, so that to each
man of science Nature is what he individually be-
lieves her to be." Prof. Kingdon Clifford, in his
lecture upon the " Aims and Instruments of Scien-
tific Thought," delivered before the British Asso-
ciation at Brighton, IS 72, discusses at considerable
length the question, " What do wTe mean when we
say that the uniformity of Nature is exact ? " and
concludes that we mean by it " no more than this,
that we are able to state general rules which are far
more exact than direct experiment, and which apply
to all cases that we are at present likely to come
across." .

Not only in general do scientific men admit the
imperfections and inexactitude of science, but, in
particular. Dr. Paget, in mentioning the advantages
of the study of physiology, mentions as one of them,
the fact that it is " a very uncertain and incomplete
science," well adapted, therefore, he thinks, to disa-
8

170 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

buse young men of the too prevalent idea that a
plain yes or no can be answered to every question
that can be plainly asked, and that every thing thus
answered is a settled thing, and to be maintained as a
point of conscience. Herbert Spencer has recently
shown, in his volume on the " Study of Sociology,"
the uncertainties that beset social science. The
phenomena to be studied here, he states, are not of a
directly perceptible kind, to be examined by scientific
instruments, like those of astronomy or chemistry,
nor are they to be recognized by introspection, like
the phenomena of psychology. The disturbance of
the various emotions and prejudices of the observers,
the political, educational, patriotic, theological, and
class biases, add to the difficulty. Thirdly, a danger
still more subtile and difficult to escape from arises
from the exceptional position of the observer, who
is inevitably himself a part of the very aggregate
that he studies, and cannot divest himself of the
personal interests and partial predispositions arising
therefrom.

In regard to political economy, what Daniel
Webster said in 1830 is still, in great measure, ap-
plicable. " For my part," says Webster, " though
I like investigation of political questions, I give up
what is called the ' science of political economy.'
There is no such science. There are no rules on
the subject so fixed and invariable as that their ag-
gregate constitutes a science. I believe I have re-
cently run over twenty volumes, and from the whole,

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 171

if I should pick out with one hand all the mere
truisms, and with the other all the doubtful propo-
sitions, little would be left." Although since then
we have had the able and laborious investigations
of Mill, Bastiat, and Carey, nevertheless, I believe
there is little more general agreement among politi-
cal economists, and few more invariable rules that
are unanimously accepted.

Even the most exact of sciences, astronomy, is
far from perfectly exact. "Many persons," says
Jevons,1 "may be misled by the expression exact
science, and may think that the knowledge acquired
by scientific methods admits of our reaching abso-
lutely true laws, exact to the last degree. . . . The
very satisfactory degree of accuracy attained in the
science of astronomy gives a certain plausibility to
erroneous notions of this kind. . . . Kepler's laws
are not proved, if by proof we mean certain demon-
stration of their exact truth. Even if we could ob-
serve the motions of a planet of a perfect globular
shape, free from all perturbing or retarding forces,
we could never perfectly prove that it moved in an
ellipse. To prove the elliptical form we should have
to measure infinitely small angles and infinitely small
fractions of a second; we should have to perform
impossibilities. . . . But, secondly, as a matter of
fact, no planet does move in a perfect ellipse or
manifest the truth of Kepler's laws exactly. . . .
The mutual perturbations of the planets distort the

1 Chapter xxi.

172 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

elliptical paths. Those laws, again, hold true only
of infinitely small planetary bodies, and, when two
great globes like the sun and Jupiter attract each
other, the law must be modified. . . . Even at the
present day discrepancies exist between the observed
dimensions of the planets' orbits and their theoretical
magnitudes, after making allowance for all disturbing
causes.1 Nothing, in fact, is more certain in scientific
method than that approximate coincidence can alone
be expected. In the measurement of continuous
quantity, perfect correspondence must be purely ac-
cidental, and should give rise to suspicion rather than
to satisfaction." 2

It is from measurement that the great certainty
of science, where it is certain, comes. " Obviously,"
says Herbert Spencer,8 " it is this reduction of the
sensible phenomena it represents to relations of
magnitude which gives to any division of knowledge
its especially scientific character." . As Davy said,
" Nothing tends so much to the advancement of
knowledge as the application of a new instrument."
But it is only the simpler things that are open to
even approximate measurement. After two centu-
ries of labor the most eminent mathematical talent
has succeeded in calculating the mutual effect of
three bodies upon each other under the single force
of gravity only approximatimly . Astronomers have

1 See Lockyer's " Lessons in Elementary Astronomy."

2 " Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 73.
8 "Recent Discussions," p. 162.

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 173

not even attempted the general problem of the simul-
taneous attractions of four, five, six, or more bodies,
resolving the general problem into so many different
problems of three bodies. But an atom of a single
substance, says Jevons,1 " is probably a vastly more
complicated system than that of the planets and
their satellites. A compound atom perhaps may be
compared with a stellar system, each star a minor
system in itself. The smallest particle of solid
substance will consist of a vast number of such stel-
lar systems, united in regular order, each bounded
by the other, communicating with it in some man
ner, yet wholly incomprehensible. . . . There is
every reason to believe that each constituent of a
chemical atom must go through an orbit in the mill-
ionth part of the twinkling of an eye, in which it
successively or simultaneously is under the influence
of many other constituents, or possibly conies into
collision with them. It is, I apprehend, no exag-
geration to say that mathematicians have scarcely a
notion of the way in which they could successfully
attack so difficult a problem of forces and motions.
Each of these particles is forever solving differential
equations, which, if written out in full, might per-
haps belt the earth, as Sir John Herschel has beau-
tifullv remarked."

In the simplest natural phenomena, therefore,
there will always be numberless factors whose exact
influence can never be ascertained. "Until we

1 "Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 453.

174 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

know thoroughly the nature of matter, and the
forces which produce its motions," say Thomson and
Tait,1 " it will be utterly impossible to submit to
mathematical reasoning the exact conditions of any
physical question." The approximate solutions
which are reached " are attained by a species of ab-
straction or rather limitation of the data, and thus
the infinite series of forces really acting may be left
out of consideration." In science, then, the problems
solved do not reproduce the actual order in its real
complexity, and the laws and explanations are more
or less hypothetical, and apply to nothing which we
see or feel. Even physical astronomy, where the
nearest approximation to actual conditions is found,
is full of assumptions and neglect of numberless dis-
crepancies. It is assumed in it that the other mill-
ions of existing systems exert no perturbing influ-
ence on our system ; that the planets are perfect
ellipsoids with absolutely smooth surfaces and homo-
geneous interiors — assumptions, part of them, cer-
tainly untrue, as every hill and mountain show, and
the rest very doubtful. In regard to other branches
of science the same thing is true. Scientific in-
vestigators speak and calculate about homogeneous
substances, perfect fluids and gases, inflexible bars,
points at which the gravity of bodies is concentrated,
uniform spheres, etc. ; but in reality there are no
such things in Nature. Take one of the simplest
problems in mechanics, the use of a crowbar to raise

1 " Natural Philosophy," vol. i., p. 337.

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 175

a heavy stone, and we shall find, as Thomson and
Tait have pointed out, that we neglect far more
than we observe.1 If we suppose the bar to be quite
rigid, the fulcrum and stone perfectly hard, and the
points of contact real points, we might give the true
relation of the forces. But, in reality, the bar will
bend, the stone may yield a trifle, and the points of
contact are not absolute points, and the extension
and compression of the different parts involve us in
difficulties which no mathematics can cope with. In
a practical point of view, these effects are generally
inappreciable; but, compared with absolute exacti-
tude, there will always remain gaps not to be closed
up.

Especially when we would know any of the
higher orders of existence, there must be uncertainty
in our knowledge. The inorganic is somewhat sub-
jectible to measure, but, when we enter the realm of
the vital or the mental, we come to that which can
no longer be put into feet and inches, pounds and
ounces. "We cannot," as Dr. W. O. Johnson re-
cently warned his medical brethren, " describe the
commonest chemical change going on in the body.
"We cannot define the simplest of the vital pro-
cesses." In the words of the chemist Berthollet?
" AYe know nothing of any one of them thoroughly,
since a perfect knowledge of any one of them in-
volves a perfect knowledge of all the laws and forces
which continue to produce it." What shall we say,

1 " Treatise on Natural Philosophy," vol. i., p. 337, etc.

176 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

then, of the higher problems of the intellectual and
spiritual order? Here, Science finds herself in a
realm of mystery. What measuring-rod can science
put to the sense of beauty ? By what weight-stand-
ard can it estimate the quantitative energy of a
thought ? By what calculus can right and wrong be
reduced to foot-pounds ? By what moral astronomy
shall the track of free-will be predicted, and the
infinite complications and ever-changing equilibra
tions of society be foretold ?

"In human affairs, then," as Jevons well says,1
" the real application of scientific method is out of
the question."

Or take the measures with which science reaches
its greatest precision — a precision oftentimes really
marvelous. In comparison with these standards,
the variability of conscience is pointed out, and the
shif tings of moral judgment in different ages and
peoples are declared to disprove the existence of any
authoritative moral faculty, or at least to disprove
the existence of any fixed standard of right and
wrong. But is science really any better off in these
respects? Has it any absolute standard measure,
either of direction, time, weight, or extension, any
more than religion of morality or faith ? Xot a bit.
All the instruments with which scientific men per
form their measurements are more or less faulty.
A surface of mercury is supposed to be perfectly
plane, but even in the breadth of five inches there is

1 Vol. ii., p. 460.

SCIENTIFIC RE8UZ1 177

a calculable divergence from a true plane of about
a ten-millionth part of an inch. A yjluinb-line is
ssnmed to be perfectly vertical, but. owing to the
attractions of mountains and other inequa- l\ - on
the earth's surface, this is never absolutelv true, and
in extensive surveys has to be approximatively cor-
rected. In measuring time, the pendulum, admi-
rable as it is. is not absolutelv invariab" T:.e
slightest change in the form or weight of the pen-
dulum, such as changes : temperature, the slight— ~
eon - - any par*, i the most minute displa

ment of the point : suspens >n, readily can s e .
w ild falsify th^ result.

The best unit of time is the tation of a freelv-
moving body. But when we inquire where the
freelv-movii;_ dy is. "no Batisf I mswer."

- ys Jevons. "can be driven." Practicallv. the i -
t 'ing globe is sufficiently accurate. : . long

time has n ssecl - ~:ronomers thought it im-

possible to detect any inequality in its movement :
but it is now known that the friction oi ti lal
waves and the ra«iiation of heat in* - ace h -
slightly de sed the rapidity of the earth's moti
The moon's motion round the earth and the ~ii*s
motion round the sun form the next 1 est measure
of time. But the-- also are subject to disturtV
ances from other planets or heavenly bodies, and
from the loss of ener^r through slight resistances
met in their pass _e through sp:-. ;-e. "TTe thus."
says Jevons, "'appear to be devoid of any hope

178 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

of establishing a sure standard of the efflux of
time."

Turning to space measurements, we find it
equally difficult to obtain any invariable standard.

To construct or preserve an unchangeable stand-
ard bar is something which is not possible, or at
least cannot be shown to be possible. Passing over
the practical difficulty of defining the ends of the
standard length with sufficient accuracy, we have no
means of proving that the substance of the bar does
not contract or expand with age or temperature. It
is certain that many rigid and invariable substances
do change in dimensions both from age and tempera-
ture. If we take, as our unit, a certain fraction of
the earth's circumference, this likewise is exposed
to uncertainty from possible changes in the earth's
magnitude and the difficulty of measuring the earth
with sufficient accuracy. Or, lastly, if we take as a
standard the length of a seconds pendulum, we
must assume that the attraction of gravity at a
given point, and the length of a sidereal day, remain
entirely unchanged, neither assumption, as far as we
can judge, being absolutely correct.

Similar difficulties beset attempts to obtain un-
changeable weights or standards of density, mass,
motion, or heat. Besides the disturbing conditions
known, but impossible sufficiently to guard against,
vitiating all these standards, there are also conditions
which it is always possible may exist unsuspected.

The fact is, that the realm of experience, in-

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 179

Btead of being the favored seat of exact truth, can
never give us any absolute certainty. In the words
of Judge Stallo, at the conclusion of his remark-
able articles on the " Primary Concepts of Sci-
ence," * " there is no absolute system of coordinates
in space to which the positions of bodies and their
changes can be referred ; and there is neither an
absolute measure of quantity, nor an absolute stand-
ard of quality. There is no physical constant"
No absolute physical standard is even conceivable.
The only absolute certainty is in the realm of ideas
— of intuitions. As far as both science and religion
are founded on them, they possess absolute cer-
tainty. As far as they are experimental, they par-
take more or less of the same relative validity and
absolute uncertainty.

Whenever knowledge is destitute of absolute
certainty, its history will represent a series of
changes, whereby the absolute truth is more and
more approximated. This is notably the case with
religion. The rude phases which first it took on,
the changes and transformations through which it
has passed, have been common targets for com-
ments by no means complimentary. But it is the
same with science. Nothing is more contrary to
the whole spirit of modern science, more absurd,
indeed, to a modern intellect, than some of the sci-
entific theories of Bacon. Kepler was full of chi-
merical notions, and we know from his own writ-

1 Popular Science Monthly, December, 1873.

130 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

ings the numerous errors into which, he fell. Ac-
cording to one of his earlier scientific works, the
sun, stars, and planets,, were typical of the Trinity,
and God distributed the planets in space in accord-
ance with the regular polyhedrons, etc. He grave-
ly held that there could not be more than six plan-
ets because there were not more than five regular
solids. His famous laws were the one true discov-
ery among a score of vain and groundless specula-
tions, and, even in the investigations that led him to
these, he proceeded upon the false supposition that
the sun's motion was requisite to keep up the mo-
tion of the planets, as well as to deflect and modify
it. Even the acute genius of Huyghens did not
prevent him from inferring that but one satellite
could belong to Saturn, because, with those of Jupi-
ter and the earth, it made up the perfect number of
six. Before the time of Torricelli, physicists be-
lieved that Nature abhorred a vacuum, and this was
the reason why water rose in a pump ; but when
Torricelli pointed out the fact that water would not
rise more than thirty-three feet in a pump, nor mer-
cury more than thirty inches, and thus above these
points Nature had no objections to any vacuum, an-
other cause had to be sought.

Yan Helmont, who is immortalized by the study
of the gases, believed that each part of the body
had an archaeus or special spiritual agent, subordi-
nate to the principal archseus, which he located in
the stomach, the seat also assigned by him to the

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. \§\

intellect. The distinguished Vesalius, who, by his
careful dissections, overthrew the hitherto unchal-
lenged system of Galen, and first put anatomy upon
a scientific foundation, did not dream of disputing
that authority concerning the distribution of the
blood, and therefore imagined that it distilled
through the pores of the unbroken" and imperme-
able portion, and steadily denied the existence of
valves in the veins, although others had already ob-
served them.

In modern times similar mistakes have been re-
peatedly made. The history of chemistry shows
how substances have been confounded with one an-
other. " Thus strontia," says Jevons,1 " was never
discriminated from baryta till Klaproth and Haiiy
detected differences between some of their proper-
ties. There is now no doubt that the recently-dis-
covered substances, caesium and rubidium, were
long mistaken for potassium. The history of sci-
ence is the history of the constant correction of ear-
lier experimenters by later, causes of error which
afterward are most apparent being at first over-
looked. The Arabian astronomers determined the
meridian by taking the middle point between the
places of the sun when at equal altitudes on the
same day. They neglected the fact that the sun
has its own motion among the stars in the interven-
ing time. Newton thought that the mutual disturb-
ances of most of the planets might be disregarded.

1 " Principles," vol i., p. 273.

182 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

The expansion of quicksilver was long used as the
measure of temperature, in ignorance of the fact
that the rate of expansion increases with the tem-
perature. Rumford, in his first experiment leading
to a determination of the mechanical equivalent of
heat, disregarded the heat absorbed by the box con-
taining the water heated.1 Lavoisier's ideas con-
cerning the constitution of acids have received a
complete refutation. He named oxygen the acid-
generator because he believed that all acids were
compounds of oxygen, a generalization which fur-
ther investigations disproved. Berzelius's theory
of the dual formation of chemical compounds has
met a similar fate. On its ruins has risen the ISTew
Chemistry. The simple splitting and pairing the-
ory has been abandoned, and we are becoming fa-
miliar with the idea of unitary structure, molecular
types, and transformations by substitutions and re-
placements, in which the arrangement of the ele-
ments is of as much consequence as the question
which they are.

This succession of various theories is a phenom-
enon that cannot fail to strike him who studies
the progress of scientific ideas as something com-
mon to all branches of physical investigation. In
the early days of geology fossils were looked upon
as the results of the fermentation of matter, or
of terrestrial exhalations, or were supposed to be
mere earthy concretions or sports of matter. When,

1 Jevons, " Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 86.

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 183

after two centuries of discussion, the belief that
they were the remains of fossils gained sway, it
was still held that the I^oachian Deluge was the
cause of all the past changes on the earth's surface.
Discovery after discovery worked the refutation
of this idea. Still all geologic changes were looked
upon as sudden, of the nature of catastrophes : one
school, the Plutonists, regarding lire as the great
agent of all rock-formations ; the other school, the
Keptunists, holding that even the so-called igneous
rocks were chemical precipitates from the waters.
In the present century these theories have given
way to the Uniformitarian theory, which refers
the greatest geological changes to the agency of
forces still in action, and this is now giving way
to the Evolution theory. Recent discoveries, such
as the finding of worked flints lying in strata, and
in connection with extinct mammalia, hitherto sup-
posed to be anterior to man ; the discovery of the
Eozoon in the Laurentian rocks of Canada ; and
especially the revelations made by the dredging ex-
peditions, of the present contemporaneous formation
of the chalk and lime deposits hitherto supposed to
indicate different geologic epochs — have worked al-
most a revolution in geology. The strata of the
earth's crust are hardly more various and irregular
than the diverse theories in regard to their origin
and history that from generation to generation have
prevailed So in the history of biology. Passing
by the mystical school, with its doctrines of sig-

134 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

natures and astrological fancies, as undeserving the
name of even primitive science, we have the Iatro-
chemical school of the seventeenth century, in which
the reactions of the acid and alkali, and various
other chemical principles and processes, explained
every thing ; then, in the first half of the eigh-
teenth century, the mechanical school of Borelli,
and the corpuscular hypothesis of Descartes, fol-
lowed by the Yital Fluid theory, in which all the
peculiar functions of life are supposed to depend
upon a subtile ethereal substance diffused through
the organism, this again yielding to the two rival the-
ories of modern physiology, the Psychical and the
Physical theories ; one maintaining an immaterial
vital principle, the other that the processes of life
are but transformations of the various physical
forces.1

Electricity similarly was first spoken of as a
fluid, then as a force, now as an energy or motion
readily converted into thermal, molar, or molecular
motion of various kinds. To explain heat we have
had the phlogistic, the caloric, and now the molecu-
lar motion theory. For light, we have had the
Emission and the Undulatorv theories : for the
heavens, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican sys-
tems ; in regard to forces, the Cartesian and the
Xewtonian conceptions. In the presence of the
new dynamics, the new botany, the new chemistry
of to-day, in the presence especially of those theo-

1 Whewell's " History of Scientific Ideas," book ix , chap. ii.

SCIEXTIFIC RESULTS. 185

ries most revolutionary to all scientific ideas — the
natural selection and the evolution hypotheses — the
natural philosopher of fifty years ago would feel
that there was nothing for him to do but to learn
his science over again, and learn it all differently.
Great as have been the theologic changes in the last
century, they are more than matched by the shift-
ings of scientific theory. If in former times the
best men of science have made as many errors as it
is now proved that they have, is it likely that the
dicta of the present school of scientists are to re-
main forever unshaken ( If the past errors, if the
present possibility of error in some things, do not
interfere, nevertheless, with the substantial trust-
worthiness and validity of present science, why
should they with the trustworthiness and validity
of religion %

186 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

CHAPTER VII.

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PEOOFS OF RELIGION.

In the previous chapters I endeavored to show
that, if the foundations of religion are insecure,
those of science, also, for the same reasons and in
the same way, are uncertain. Not only can this
negative exposition be made, but positively it can
be shown that religion has valid evidences similar to
those of science. Physical investigation can claim
no monopoly of scientific method ; for, as Herbert
Spencer says, it is nothing different from ordinary
reasoning, but simply the processes of common-
sense carried out with precision. Let us consider,
then, the

SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION OF RELIGION.

The starting-point of all science is in the obser-
vation of Nature. The various senses, sight, hear-
ing, smell, touch, perceive various objects — star,
rock, water, plant, animal ; and notice their varied
qualities, heat and cold, hardness, softness, per-
fumes, sounds, forms, etc. These are compared ;

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 187

their likenesses and differences noted. Then clas-
sifications are formed — families, species, substances,
forces, laws — and, as the result of these inductions,
general propositions are laid down, the general prin-
ciple ruling in this inductive process being to classify
together the like things, separating them from the
unlike, and to interpret the unknown by the known,
not vice versa.

Now, the course of religious thought has been
the same. It may not have been aware that it
started with observation, and proceeded by induc-
tion, any more than M. Jourdain knew that he
talked prose. It may even have claimed to reach
its knowledge entirely through other sources. Nev-
ertheless, like science, its work has been, for the
most part, the interpretation of the facts of Nature,
only it has taken them up with other aim, and pur-
sued them in another direction. Mr. Huxley him-
self, urging upon clergymen the study of science,
points this out. " The theories of religion," he
says, " like all other theories, are professedly based
upon matters of fact." l

If we examine even the rudest forms of reli-
gion, we shall find their genesis, as Mr. Tylor says,2
in " the plain evidence of men's senses, as inter-
preted by a fairly consistent and rational primitive
philosophy." Mr. Tylor has explained, at length,
the various processes and reasonings which suggest

1 " Lay Sermons," p. 60.

9 " Primitive Culture," p. 387.

188 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

to the savage the doctrine of spiritual beings. To
sum them up, they are as follows : Thinking men,
at a low level of culture, observing the strange phe-
nomena of sleep, trance, dreams, disease, death, are
deeply impressed by them, and seek to account for
them. A\ nat makes the difference between a live
and a dead bodv — a conscious and an unconscious
man ? \\ nat are these human >hapes which appear
in visions ? Looking at these marvelous facts, the
ancient savage philosophers made the induction of
what we may call an apparitional soul, or ghost-soul
— an unsubstantial human image or shadow — the
cause of life and thought, independently possessing
the personal consciousness and volition of its corpo-
real owner, past or present, and able to leave the
body and flash swiftly from place to place.

This conception of spiritual beings as the causes
of life and motion once attained to, two great pos-
tulates of religion were natural inferences from it.
As the soul or spiritual being was able to leave the
body during life, and appeared in dreams after
death, it was not involved in the destruction of the
body at death, but continued to live on.

This was enough to establish for them the doc-
trine of the immortality of the soul. Then, as they
looked upon the mighty marvels of earth and sky,
so full of awe to primitive man, the grand concep-
tion of Divine Beings was reached.

The blazing sun which warmed and lighted
man ; the cloud which swallowed up the sun in the

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. ISO

midst of its career, and shot its lightning-bolts upon
the earth ; the sea which now smiled so sweetly, and
now raved along the shore with tossing mane ; the
bubbling fount, the fruitful earth, the wind, the
mountain — here were powers which did not origi-
nate with man himself, over which he could exer-
cise no control nor foresight, which were mightier
far than he. What is their nature ? Naturally he
applied to the explanation of the unknown outward
Nature the conception by which he had already ex-
plained his own life and movements. As he him-
self existed and executed his purposes and acted
upon the world through the spiritual being or soul
within him, so he believed that each celestial or
earthly body was itself or had as its mover an inde-
pendent living spiritual being. Accordingly, he
offered to these spiritual beings worship, prayer,
gifts, sacrifices, rites, and ceremonies of various
kinds, such as he deemed would win their favor,
mollify their wrath, or persuade them to effect his
wishes.

In the widening experience of man, the rude
observations of early times have been made infinite-
ly more full and exact. Further observation reveals
many errors in the primitive animistic theories of
human phenomena. Further observation shows Na-
ture not to be ruled by numerous independent voli-
tions, but to be under the government of a single
uniform system of laws. The first crude theories
of religious interpreters must, therefore, be laid

190 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

aside. Theology lias undergone many transforma-
tions between those early fancies and its modern
forms. Nevertheless, its starting-point and its meth-
od to-day are the same, only carried out with more
scientific rigor. Religion, with the help of science,
whose aid is here invaluable, surveys the vast phe-
nomena of the universe. It finds Nature not the
same from all eternity, but ever changing. It finds
these constant changes, however, directed by law.
Every effect has some regular cause. Force is linked
with force. Principle dovetails into principle.
Creature is grouped with creature, forming an hier-
archy of species, genus, order, and class. Thus the
Ivosmos discloses itself as a wonderful order. A
luxuriant and exquisite loveliness beams thence
upon the eye. Whether the devout or the unde-
vout survey Nature, the beauty which graces it,
ranging in scale all the way from the majestic glory
of Alpine scenery to the symmetry of a snow-flake's
facets, or the microscopic chasings of a diatom, can-
not be unadmired. Again, in the admirable corre-
lation of structure to environment, and of organ to
function, in the mutual interdependence of animal
and vegetable life, in the continuous self -adjustments
of part to part and change to change, in the ingen-
ious contrivances which minister to the prospective
harmonv of Nature, a marvelous exhibition of the
adaptation of means to ends greets the glance of
the observer. In every creature, tokens of provi-
dential impulses, stirring to activity, are revealed.

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 191

From the structureless germinal matter at the end
of a placental tuft which spontaneously burrows
into the surrounding pabulum to supply its want,
or the jelly-like amoeba which pushes out portions
of the living substance and extemporizes with them
an organ to grasp its food, up to the insects which,
impelled by the needs of the coming generation,
build their rafts of eggs to hatch out after their
death, or the human infant seeking, untaught, the
mother's breast, all living things are impelled un-
consciously to do what is needed for the maintenance
and preservation, not only of themselves, but of the
race. Through all changes and events a continual
progress from the more imperfect toward the more
perfect, a finer finish in Nature's handiwork, a
steady exaltation of faculty and power, a constant
increase in all that can minister to the well-being
or the happiness of living creatures, discloses it-
self. A work on natural theology is a treasury
of the most striking illustrations, out of the thou-
sands that might be adduced, that witness to these
facts.

Then religion surveys the phenomena of human
nature. It finds there exalted powers and activi-
ties by virtue of which the impressions on the
senses, common to man with the brute, are given
with him a higher significance. It observes the
power of memory to retain and call up again the
past ; the power of imagination to look forth into
the future, fly in thought to other climes, or build be-

192 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

fore the mind's eye ideal structures. It observes the
faculties of judging and comparing, and the concep-
tions of likeness, number, time, and space, through
which the facts of the world are classified and in-
terpreted. It discovers intuitions, such as those of
purpose, causation, and uniting law, by which the
medley of events is reduced to an intelligible whole.
It finds powers of abstraction and expression, by
which man builds up the beautiful edifice of lan-
guage and the solid masonries of logic. Unlike
the bird or beast, man does not lie down in dull
content. There is something in him that makes
him dream of ideal excellence, fascinates him with
every intimation of the infinite, draws him after
the perfect. A divine disquietude fills him till he
can realize them. The unalterable serenity which
reigns elsewhere in Nature, in man gives place to
the dramatic agitations of consciousness. For the
rigid determinism, the iron fatality of the physical
world, breaks off when we come to humanity, and
another law appears — the law of freedom. Man
finds that he enjoys the peculiar privilege of liberty
of thought and liberty of will, that he has a power
over Nature and over self, and that he can exercise
it as he chooses. He labors, therefore, to make
these conform to his wishes and conceptions, and
minister to his delights. Knowledge of the world's
order is in his hands only an instrument for act-
ing upon it. He becomes, as it were, a second
creator. He levels forests, he drains morasses, he

POSITIVE SCIEXTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 193

tames and introduces this animal, lie banishes that,
he transforms the nature of plant and fruit. From
brute matter he draws forth the skillful tool and
the industrious, almost intelligent, machine, and
multiplies infinitely his force. On the frescoed
wall he fastens his glowing vision of beauty. In
woven harmonies he utters his unspeakable aspira-
tions and infinite longings. In the forest-like arch-
es of the cathedral he rears the enduring symbol of
his reverence and awe for the divine. He looks
upon the body of every fellow-man while living as
animated by a being peculiarly sacred and vital ;
and, wThen the body is laid in the ground, it is his
belief (in every race and nation, alike the most ig-
norant and the most cultivated upon the globe) that
the man still lives on.

Most characteristic of all, there is in human na-
ture a moral order more beautiful than anv thins;
that art can show, more imperative in its inexora-
bleness than any law of Nature — the order of duty.
It is the high prerogative of man to perceive distinc-
tions of right and wrong, unseen by any creature
except himself, unseen by him through any organ
of sense, revealed only to that marvelous inner eye
— conscience. The right thus seen he feels bound
to obey, though he has to go through fire and tor-
ture to do it. The wrong must be shunned, though
the very heart-strings be torn asunder thereby.
This moral law, as a French writer has well ex-
pressed it, " though it accord not with the selfish
9

191 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

ends of interest, the order of desire, nor the fickle
trifling of his passing passions, nevertheless appears
to him as the ideal end, the very crown of life, and
he summons Nature to work with him for its real-
ization."

Such are the phenomena which theology observes
in Mature, without and within the circle of hu-
manity.

The next step in the scientific method, as has
been already noticed, is that of comparison and
classification. To group together in the mind the
things which are alike, and to distinguish them from
the things unlike them, is, as Herbert Spencer states
it, " not only the beginning of civilization, but the
first step in the genesis of science."

Now, passing over all those minor classifications
and those secondary causes which science studies so
assiduously, minutely, and successfully, what ulti-
mate classifications may be made and what first
causes may be found by which to interpret the uni-
verse most fully and completely % This is just the
question which theology has asked, and in its way
answered. It has divided the universe into two
great groups, each, within its own limits, containing
the widest range of similar phenomena, and sepa-
rated from each other by the broadest contrast of
nature. One group contains all natural phenomena,
such as weight, size, form, heat, color, motion ; the
other, all mental or spiritual phenomena, perception,
reason, love, will, aspiration.

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 195

In the one group, inertia is the law ; in the other,
spontaneity. In the one, necessity ; in the other,
freedom. In the one, the phenomena have a defi-
nite relation to space — they have always a certain
dimension, or local or extended movement; they
can be weighed or measured. The phenomena of
the other, on the contrary, exist in relation not to
space, but to time ; they have not extension, bnt du-
ration ; they cannot be either weighed or measured.
The phenomena of the one are discerned by the
senses; those of the other, by no sense, but only by
consciousness itself. In the one group, every thing
is divisible, even the smallest conceivable quantity
is conceivably still further separable ; in the other
group, the subject affirms its indivisibility and iden-
tity. In the one group every thing belongs to the
earthly and the finite. In the other group there is
a constant attraction and rise toward that which lies
higher.

These two great groups of phenomena having
been thus clearly marked off from each other, re-
ligion then makes its inductions. As science infers,
in explanation of the different phenomena exhibited
by liquids and gases, that there is a different molecu-
lar structure as the respective substratum or sub-
ject of each ; and in explanation of the diverse
chemical properties of two chemical elements, such
as potassium and oxygen, that there is a diverse
atomic constitution as the subject of each ; and again
for the luminous vibrations still another subject,

196 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

called ether, different from the subject of pondera-
ble things — so religion, in explanation of the dif-
ferences of material and spiritual phenomena, infers,
as the subjects of each, distinct underlying realities,
which it calls, in the one case, "matter," in the
other, "spirit." This " spirit," it is true, has never
been seen by mortal eye, probably never will be
seen by mortal eye, and is therefore known only by
a mental inference. But the same is true of mole-
cule, atom, and ether. As these invisible things are
inferred by science from the visible phenomena
which it observes according to the mental law, that
phenomena or qualities must belong to something
as a subject, and that when the qualities are radi-
cally different the subjects must be supposed differ-
ent, so is " spirit " the corresponding induction of
religion from mental and moral phenomena.

As the imagination will not, in Tyndall's x lan-
guage, "accept a vibrating multiple proportion, a
numerical ratio in a state of oscillation," as the
source of a train of ether-undulations, but "the
scientific imagination, which is here authoritative,
demands, as the origin and cause of a series of
ether-waves, a particle of vibrating matter, quite
as definite, though it may be excessively minute,
as that which gives origin to a musical sound;'1
so, conversely, the religious imagination, in the re-
ligious realm equally authoritative, will not accept
as the source of mental and moral states a vibrating

i "Fragments of Science," p. 135.

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 197

material particle, but demands, as the origin and
cause of spiritual phenomena, a spiritual subject,
quite as distinct from matter as its phenomena are
distinct from material phenomena.

If an independent spiritual entity be a correct
induction from spiritual phenomena, it will readily
be seen to follow that this spiritual entity or soul,
not being a compound, but an indivisible unit, as it
constantly affirms, will not be dissolved by the dis-
solution of the body, but simply be released from its
mortal coils. The same conclusion results also from
the universal belief of mankind in a life after death.
The philologists comparing the various languages of
the Indo-European race — Sanscrit, Greek, Eoman,
Teutonic — find in them all certain common roots.
Thev infer that these common roots must have been

t/

in use in the primitive Aryan race, before it left its
ancient home in the table-lands of Asia and was dis-
persed in India, Greece, Italy, and Germany. From
these common roots they tell us the social, political,
and domestic conditions of our primitive ancestors.
Again, geologists, observing the various appearances
and peculiar illustrations of extreme antiquity which
the earth presents, assume that they are not artificial
or simulated, as bigoted defenders of the Mosaic
record have sometimes contended, but that the testi-
mony of primitive Nature may be relied upon as
truthful. By parity of reasoning, religion infers
from the universality of the belief in life after death
that it is at once a primitive deliverance of human

19 S PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

nature, and as such ought to be accepted as vera-
cious.

The existence of the soul, now and hereafter —
this is the first great induction of religion. Then
follows the second, that of Deity. If we consider
the work of the palaeontologist, philologist, geolo-
gist, or mechanician, we shall find them always
searching after the causes of things. What is the
origin of plants and animals? how did languages
beo-in ? how did the earth come into existence and
into its present condition \ — these are the questions
which are perseveringly studied by these physical
investigators. The principle upon which they pro-
ceed in their inquiries is, that all motion or change,
of whatever kind, had some ulterior cause. "With
none of them is the business of scientific inquiry
closed with the first induction of a cause. Beyond
the proximate cause, they say, there must be a more
remote. Xo sooner is it found, for example, that
the peculiar scratches on rocks and upon banks of
characteristically-shaped stone, running across the
mouth of certain valleys in Scotland, are caused by
ancient glaciers, than the inquiry is made, "What is
the cause of these glaciers ? " If they are recognized
as products of snow long and tightly pressed to-
gether, then the snow must be traced to its cause in
the action of extreme cold upon the moisture of the
air ; and now a cause must be sought for this exces-
sive cold which no longer exists in the same regions.
If this again be plausibly referred to a change in the

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 199

earth's orbit, its distance from the sun diminishing
the amount of heat received by the earth, the in-
vestigator does not cease his inquiries, but demands
an explanation of this change of orbit. And when
this is found in a secular change in the direction of
the earth's axis, still traceable, the torch of inquiry
is brought to bear upon the very origin of the plane-
tary system.

Thus the man of science is led farther and
farther back, each secondary cause of the chain re-
solving itself as soon as reached into an effect of
something else. This chain may run on to more
and more remoteness. It may reach greater and
greater simplicity and power. Nevertheless, the
mind cannot find any satisfactory resting-place at
any point of it, nor can it be satisfied to pursue
indefinitely this phenomenal series. It conceives
necessarily a first cause, a commencement, not mere-
ly for each part, but for the whole of the chain — an
ultimate cause dependent upon nothing previous.
It is the value of every true step made in philoso-
phy, Newton said, that it brings us nearer to this
first cause. " The business of natural philosophy'1
— these also are the words of the greatest of scien-
tific authorities — " is to deduce causes from effects
till we come to the very first cause, which certainly
is not mechanical."

Now, it is just this path and end that religion
pursues. It is true that of late men of science have
themselves held back from taking the last step, to

200 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

the Ultimate Source, as a thing beyond their proper
province. But they ought not to object to religion's
doing it in strict accordance with the method of sci-
ence up to the point where the province of the latter
was thought to cease. Some such ultimate source or
first cause must be conceived. For the universe is
not an eternal quiescence. It is in constant change,
constant motion. And these changes and motions
are part of a series actually existing and progressing.
~No matter what intermediate causes or agencies there
may have been, the mind is not satisfied to stop with
any of these, but passes farther and farther back,
seeking the first cause, which must some time have
first started the series. Xow, this first cause cannot
be matter itself ; for matter has no spontaneity of
action. The essential idea of matter — an idea which
is fundamental to all scientific dealing with it — is
that matter is inert ; remains in its present condi-
tion forever, unless disturbed bv some external
agency. If matter did not observe this law, no
science of it would be possible. In whatever con-
dition and position matter originally existed, in that
it must always have remained. To start the evolu-
tion of the universe, some external agency, possessed
of spontaneity, must be inferred. As the only spon-
taneous agent we know of is free-will, the will of
some Supreme Being must be regarded as the great
First Cause.

A similar induction results from examining the
nature of the proximate causes of change. A light-

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 201

ning-flash, for example, was found by Franklin,
in his famous experiment with the kite, to be of
the same nature as an electric discharge. The elec-
tric discharge was attributed to the action of elec-
tric fluid, but further investigation showed it to
be a case of molecular motion. Heat, light, sound,
have all likewise, in turn, been found to be modes
of motion, capable of conversion one into the other.
Going one step farther back, all motion is found
to have its source in some force — gravitative, co-
hesive, repulsive, chemical, or other kind. As
Herbert Spencer says, " We come down finally
to force as the ultimate." What, then, is this
last universal cause, this wondrous force % We do
not actually observe force in the external world at
all. When we observe a change in the external
world, all that is really observed is the following of
one event by another. We believe that there is
force working this succession, because when the line
strikes us we feel force, and especially because in
acts of the will we are conscious that we exert force.
" Undoubtedly," says Mr. Huxley,1 " active force is
inconceivable except as a state of consciousness, . . .
except as something comparable to volition." Sir
John Herschel similarly says,2 " In the only case in
which we are admitted to any personal knowledge
of the origin of force, we find it connected, pos-

1 Article entitled " Bishop Berkeley on the Metaphysics of Sen-
sation," Macmillari's Magazine, 18V1.

2 "Familiar Lectures," p. 461.

202 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

sibly by intermediate links untraceable by our facul-
ties, but yet indisputably connected with volition,
and by inevitable consequence with motive, with
intellect, and with all those attributes of mind in
which — and not in the possession of arms, legs,
brains, and viscera — personality consists." To these
names I might add the names of Carpenter, Spen-
cer, Grove, and Wallace, in science — not to speak
of eminent authorities in philosophy, all of whom
derive our knowledge of force from our volitional
and mental experiences. As in the only case where
we know force directly we find it to be an attribute
of will and intelligence, an energy and expression
of spirit, we must infer next, in accordance with the
steps already taken, in accordance with the general
rule of science, to interpret the unknown by the
known, that force everywhere else is but an energy
and expression of spirit — and of what other spirit
can it be than of the One Infinite and Almighty
Personality whom we call God ?

Drawing another inductive line, religion reaches
the same conclusion. From the wise adaptation of
means to ends in vegetable and animal life, the
physiologist and anatomist are accustomed to infer
certain designs or purposes as their explanation, and
they freely employ this idea of design to assist them
in solving the problems of their departments. Dr.
Paget,1 speaking of the study of physiology, claims
as one of its advantages that it " is a science of de-

1 Youraans's " Culture demanded by Modern Life," p. 139.

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 203

signs and final causes. ... In the inorganic world,"
he says, " we seem to come nearer to the efficient
than to the final cause of events. But in the or-
ganic world the reverse is true ; purpose, design,
and mutual fitness, are manifest wherever we can
discern the structure or the actions of a part ; utility
and mutual dependence are implied in all the lan-
guage and sought in all the studies of physiology.
The efficient causes and the general laws of the vital
actions may be hidden from the keenest search ; but
their final causes are often nearly certain."

In the history of physiology, Whewell has shown
that those who studied the structure of animals were
irresistibly led to the conviction that the parts of
this structure have each its end or purpose ; that
each member or organ not merely produces a cer-
tain effect, or answers to a certain use, but is so
framed as to impress us with the persuasion that
it was constructed for that use. This persuasion
directed the researches of Harvey. By the assidu-
ous application of this principle, as he himself con-
stantly declared, Cuvier was enabled to make the
discoveries that have rendered his name so illus-
trious ; and it has been dwelt upon as a favorite
contemplation, and followed as the most certain of
guides, by the best anatomists and biologists. More-
over, from such cases of curious adaptation, science
has not alone affirmed design, but also some De-
signer. One of the most astonishing of modern dis-
coveries is that of the extreme antiquity of man,

20tt PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

antedating, probably, the date formerly assigned by
tens of thousands of years. How is it that science
has been able to establish this \ Simply by the dis-
covery, in certain positions, of articles which it in-
ferred were of human workmanship — bits of pot-
tery under fifty feet of Nile-mud ; instruments of
bone or stone under thirty or forty feet of peat ;
flint axes, spear-heads, daggers, and knives, some-
times rudely carved with the representation of an
ibex-head, a reindeer, or a rhinoceros, found in the
drift of the Tertiary period in connection with the
bones of extinct animals, such as the mammoth,
cave-bear, or woolly rhinoceros. And why was it
judged that these articles were of human origin,
rather than natural ? Only through the principle,
either expressly stated or clearly implied, that in-
struments, fashioned in accordance with a regular
plan, and adapted to an intelligent purpose, could
not be the result of chance, or of unintelligent
force or unconscious principles of order, but must
have had intelligent — that is, in this case, human —
makers.

In the same way — employing the same princi
pies of reasoning — religion argues, from the evi-
dences of fitness and contrivance in the world, in-
telligent design, and from the intelligent design an
Intelligent Designer of supreme power and wisdom,
equal to the supreme work manifested in the uni-
verse of creation. The theological argument is of
the same kind as the reasoning of the archaeologist,

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 205

only vastly more cogent in proportion as the in-
stances of adaptation from which the theologian
starts are incalculably more numerous and curious
than those of the physical inquirer. The proofs
of design which the theist reasons from are not
drawn from a few scratches on a bone, or a hole
drilled through a piece of obsidian, or a few sharp-
ened bits of flint, now and then found in a gravel-
pit or a cave. They are present wherever we turn
our eye : in the coincident mathematics of plant
and planet ; in the untaught geometry of the bee-
hive ; in the admirable correlation of lung and air,
sound and hearing, light and sight ; in the mutual
ministries of male and female, life and death, mat-
ter and spirit. From the wayside seed, laden with
future provision for the folded germ, to the clus-
tered systems, swinging in noiseless motion and
perfect poise through the ethereal spaces, all Na-
ture testifies to the Arranging Mind that has mar-
shaled the atomic armies according to well-ordered
plan.

It is true that scientific men, of late, have ob-
jected strongly to religion's employment of the
teleological argument. They charge that it leaves
the field of experience to launch into that of un-
verifiable conjecture. If so, they but condemn their
own practice in the field of anatomy, archaeology,
and physiology.

If no man of science will accept a poniard fash-
ioned from a reindeer's horn, or the rude repre-

206 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

sentation of the reindeer carved on its handle, as
having come into existence by some chance com-
bination of matter, or blind working of natural
force, without the aid of designing mind, will he
maintain, will any one maintain, that such chance
combination of matter, or blind working of natural
force, could bring into existence the breathing ?nan
that carved it and the living reindeer thus depicted ?
It is represented that, by showing how certain effects
necessarily follow from certain antecedent conditions,
all ground for supposing a prospective purpose is
removed. " Because the fish," we are told, " has fins
and gills, therefore, it uses them, and swims in the
water. That is all. There is no need to suppose
the fins and gills were made for that use." But
how does the first truth militate against the last ?
If a purpose is wisely carried out, the means em-
ployed will always be such as lead naturally and
necessarily to the end aimed at. To show that there
is no design in the case, it ought to be shown, not
that the structure of the fish naturally results in his
swimming in the water, but that it is opposed to it.
Xor do the theories of natural selection and evolu-
tion, if we suppose them already established, give
any such fatal blow to the teleological argument as
it is urged that they do. The inference of design
is not to be removed by showing that the present
form or adaptation is not the original one, but a
development from some rude structure, a modifica-
tion of some more primitive function, and that the

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 207

line of proximate causes and evolving conditions
can be traced back to a remote past and a very dif-
ferent natural condition, even perhaps to some pri-
meval nebula of glowing gas. All this but shifts
the point of action and method of work of the de-
signing intelligence, but does not diminish or abolish
the necessity of inferring it. On the contrary, it
increases the measure of Creative Mind to be sup-
posed. For in that glowing gas were cradled all
the elements of the earth-to-be. The special adapta-
tions that now have been evolved lay latent there,
and were necessarily unfolded from the general or-
der. But whence that general order — that orginal
tuning of force to law, and matter to harmonious
rhythm, and that exquisite adjustment of the whole
vast net-work of kosmic tendencies, so that Nature
should build itself up in beauty, and the strong ever
come forth from the weak, and the better proceed
always from the good, in an undeviating progress,
till the ascent is made from crystal and plant up to
the reasoning man %

Here is a greater need of intelligence than ever.
Unless Nature be endowed with intelligence, there
is no reason that we know why it might not have
remained a perpetual chaos — a chronic anarchy of
discordant elements, incapable of stable organization.
Certainly the original arrangement and constitution
of matter might have had any one of a million vari-
ous positions and properties, and each in the process
of evolution would have given a different result.

208 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

To choose out of the infinite variety of possible
primitive arrangements, with their corresponding
various results, just that one first arrangement and
particular rudimental structure that in gradual, ne-
cessary unfolding would work out just the present
admirable result, is a thing requiring fore-thinking
wisdom far more than any instantaneous creation.
" Natural evolution," says Prof. Owen, " by means
of slow physical and organic operations, through
Ions; ages, is not the less clearly recognizable as the
act of an adaptive mind because we have abandoned
the old error of supposing it to be the result of a
primary, direct, and sudden act of creational con-
struction.''

Even a Darwin, describing the wonderful con-
trivances existing in some of the orchids, by which
their fertilization by insect go-betweens is secured,
is compelled in spite of himself to resort to the lan-
guage of design to express the facts ; and Moleschott,
the chief of the German materialist school, in an in-
troductory address delivered at Turin, while fore-
warning the investigator against guessing at final
causes, yet would not have it believed that he is
" rash enough or blind enough to refuse to Nature a
design and an end. All those whose ideas I share
by no means deny the telos which they guess, which
they even sometimes perceive in Nature."

Again, from the spiritual wants of human nature,
the inductive line leads to the same conclusion. One
of the constant assumptions of scientific investiga-

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 209

tors is that a constant harmony exists between the
structure and the environment of any living thing.
" Wherever there is a constitutional want," the sa-
vant says, " there is a corresponding provision for
meeting it." If he finds portions of the fossilized
remains of a hitherto unknown animal, and by it
recognizes its digestive apparatus as adapted to flesh
food, then he knows that it must have had claws and
jaws suitable for rending its prey ; if he finds its di-
gestive organs ruminant, then he is assured that the
animal had teeth for cropping grass, and that there
was grass or other vegetation for it to crop. If he
finds, as was found by the late Atlantic dredging
expedition, animals at immense depths in the sea
possessed of good eyes, he makes the induction that
there is also there vegetable food for the animals to
live on (though none was actually found), and light
for the eyes to see by (though ordinary sunlight, ac-
cording to his calculations, could not penetrate thess
depths). If he is an evolutionist, like Herbert Spen-
cer, whenever, in tracing down the line of descent
he comes to a new species or a modification of an
old one, there, he supposes, some new combination
of external conditions took place corresponding U
the inward change. Even for life itself he can fina
no better definition than "the continuous adjust-
ment of internal relations to external relations."

By the same logical principle, religion draws,
from our felt need of the Divine to realize our ideal
aspirations, from our inability to remain satisfied, as

210 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

other creatures are, with the fleshly and the earthly,
the induction of a Being corresponding to these de-
mands of human nature. The inward want, rooted
in our deepest nature, of a Personal Object to whom
to direct our love, our worship, and our instinctive
prayers — a Heavenly Model to serve as the guide
and inspiration of our perfecting, an ever-present
Friend whom we may seek in all sorrow and trouble
— this inward want implies, somewhere outside of
us, the Infinite Power and Absolute Perfection
which alone maintains human nature in that har-
monious adjustment with its environment which is
found everv where else in the world.

Once more, when the scientific explorer, unearth-
ing the antiquities of Egypt or Assyria, discovers
- me tablet inscribed with laws, he not only infers
that some one carved the sentences upon the stone,
but also that thev came from the mind and heart of
some one — king, minister, or counselor. And, if the
law be wise and just, it> author is believed to have
been wise and just. If, by further researches, other
acts of this king or minister are discovered, and they
are uniformly found to be such as would promote
the happiness of the people, and would carry the na-
tion constantly forward to higher and higher stages
of physical, intellectual, and moral improvement,
the historian does not hesitate to assign to him the
attribute of benevolence.

Similarly, religion proceeds from the observation
of the moral law to the induction of a moral Law-

POSITIVE SCIEXTIFIC PROOFS. 211

giver. The profound sense of personal obligation
to do the right and avoid the wrong, testifies, the
theologian claims, to a Holy Buler. Unless these
most imperative convictions, these highest distinc-
tions of human nature, are idle dreams, they must
be the edicts of a righteous Governor. And the
profuse beauty, the constant progress exhibited in
this Ruler's works, especially the abundant means
of happiness provided for all creatures, compel us to
recognize goodness and love as among his most dis-
tinguishing qualities.

Finally, religion takes the last step of the scien-
tific method by applying to these great inductions
the test of verification.

To the hesitating novice and the flaw-picking
doubter, Religion's common injunction is, '; Just try
my teachings, and see for yourself if they do not
authenticate themselves" And. whenever the trial
is fairly made, the further harmony between the in-
ductions of religion and the experience of human
life is trimnphantly shown.

One of the most conclusive tests of science is
that of concomitant variations. John Stuart Mill,
in his system of logic, makes it the fifth canon of
induction. AVhen Faraday showed that, by making
or breaking or reversing the current of the electro-
magnet, he had complete control over a ray of light,
this was held to have proved the relation of cause
and effect between magnetism and light. Let a
man, then, make the experiment of dealing with

212 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

himself and his fellows on two opposite supposi-
tions. Let him, for a first experiment, regard and
treat men as soulless animals. How poor, how out
of joint, then, are all the results he meets with !
Why is it, if this view be true, that he cannot
reach his loftiest and most delicate development
on any such theory 1 Why is it that men so fool-
ishly sacrifice the most useful to the ideal — the
most needed bodily comforts and the most brill-
iant earthly advantages to a worthless spiritual
improvement? Why is it that even life itself is
sacrificed that this chimera of a soul may receive no
stain %

But if a man, on the contrary, will live as if
he had a soul and as if his fellow-men likewise had
souls, each day will bring him confirmation of the
great truth. In its light there are made plain to him
the puzzles which before were so incomprehensible —
this mystic attraction toward the Infinite and the
ideal, this discontent with our highest attainments,
this remorse for the smallest transgressions, this
strange fact in the realm of mind (the one exception
in the animated kingdom), that even the most fully
developed should not begin to reach a typical perfec-
tion. He comprehends now why it is that all human
glory and happiness and possession are so transitory,
and yet how the human heart with immortal fidel-
ity and hope can tell the grave that it claims in vain
aught beyond the mouldering robe of him whom it
loved.

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 213

The continued growth of thought and affection,
even until the very last, though the body long ago
passed its meridian and commenced its decline ; the
curious powers of the mind, seemingly independent
of the senses, such as are exhibited in somnambu-
lism, trance, clairvoyance, and similar phenomena ;
the utter inability of the subtlest science to find any
adequate material or physical explanation of con-
sciousness and the conscious powers — each affords
renewed verification to the religious postulate, "Man
is the possessor of a spirit."

So, too, when a man lives as if there were no
God, he experiences the confutation of his atheism
in his daily stumbles over the divine laws. But
when a man honestly makes the experiment of act-
ing steadily as if in the presence of a heavenly
Father, he finds corroborative witnesses in every
day's events. In whatever place he bows in sincere
worship to this Adorable Being, he finds it good to
be there. As often as in sincere prayer he seeks,
from above, light in the perplexities of duty, or help
in the hard battle of life, he receives the blessed an-
swer— a heavenly beam upon his way, a God-given
strength in the dusty conflict. Whenever, at bit-
ter cost to his own desires and pleasures, he has
yet obeyed the higher law of the Holy One, he has
heard in his heart the approving whisper of a Divine
voice. Whatever may be urged against the power
of prayer to modify external Nature, the spiritual
inward efficiency, the blessed reality of Divine com-

214 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

munion, is known by the direct experience of mill-
ions.

In the fortunes of kings and private citizens, in
the rise and fall of states, in the fluctuations of races
and the vicissitudes of society, in every case of con-
duct, there is shown, to use Matthew Arnold's favor-
ite phrase, "an Enduring Power, not ourselves,
which makes for righteousness." Reward and retri-
bution this Power allots in strict conformity to obe-
dience or disobedience of the Divine Command-
ment. Every student of history knows how strange
oftentimes are these vindications of God's moral
law. How curiously innocence is justified, evil un-
earthed ! The engineer of vice hoist with his own
petard, Hainan hanged on his own gallows ! How
sublime are the verifications of an Almighty Friend
which the records of the past, the fresh life of the
present, afford ! Witness the strength which the
weakest, trusting in him, have drawn to bear super-
human burdens ; the bursting of the rockiest heart,
under the heavenly touch, into sweet blossoms of
tenderness and charity ! Behold the sereneness with
which pain and anguish can be borne, the bright
faith with which the mourner can stand by the fresh-
filled grave, the courage with which the champion
of the right faces poverty, odium, perpetual annoy-
ance, nay, goes to the stake or the gallows, assured
of his vindication, hereafter on earth and at once
above. Whatever contradictions, anomalies, enig-
mas, the infinitely-varied phenomena of life can

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 215

present to religion, the sacred CEdipus, by one or the
other of her two great truths, the existence of the
soul and the existence of God, can always present a
solution.

What Whewell calls the consilience of induc-
tions— the leaping together of numerous facts of
different kinds from unconnected quarters to one
point, every new discovery or hitherto troublesome
exception taking at once a position in harmony — is
here wonderfully exemplified. It is a characteristic
of the theistic argument. In the exposition which
we gave of the theistic induction, it will be remem-
bered how line after line of inference converged to
the same point ; and here, in the process of verifica-
tion, we see the same thing afresh.

" Now," as Whewell says,1 " that rules springing
from remote and unconnected quarters should thus
leap to the same point, can only arise from that
being the point where truth resides. Accordingly,
the cases in which inductions from classes of facts
altogether different have thus jumped together be-
long only to the best-established theories wdiich the
history of science contains." For examples in
which it has been especially exemplified, Whewell
refers to the " Theory of Universal Gravitation ':
and the "Undulatory Theory of Light," and says
that the Consilience of Inductions in them is con-
sidered as establishing them beyond all doubt. " No
example can be pointed out in the whole history of

1 "Novum Organum Renovatum," p. 88.

216 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

science, so far as I am aware," adds Whewell, "in
which this Consilience of Inductions has given testi-
mony in favor of an hypothesis afterward discov-
ered to be false."

Stronger verification, then, than this would
hardly seem to be desired of religion by any one.
Yet, if it is demanded, it has a further confirma-
tion— that of prediction. " There is no more con-
vincing proof," says Prof. Jevons, " of the soundness
of scientific knowledge than that it thus confers
the gift of foresight." " Prevision," says Auguste
Comte, " is the test of true theory." The astrono-
mer's predictions of the movements of the planets,
the occurrence of eclipses, the return of comets —
even, as in Leverrier's discovery of Neptune, the
existence and movement of a hitherto unknown
body — afford the most conspicuous proof of the cor-
rectness of the Copernican system and the New-
tonian laws. Even so have the prophets of old and
the seers of God, in all time, through their compre-
hension of the great laws of moral gravitation, been
able to foretell the course of states and the coming
eclipses of individual and national glory. They
have reckoned beforehand, according to the calculus
of Divine Sovereignty, the setting of unholy stars,
now proudly flaming in the zenith, and the trium-
phant rise of unsullied orbs, veiled then, though they
were, in darkness — and, lo ! it has come to pass
even as they have said. If all supernatural instruc-
tion or illumination be denied to the prophetic voices

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 217

of ancient and modern times, then the amazing
power of insight, which must be ascribed to normal
spiritual vision, as developed by religion, testifies
with equal significance to the truth of the great
principles on which religion is based.

Thus has religion positive foundations of the
same kind as science, and they may be built up in a
genuine scientific order. Doubtless a sharp scien-
tific critic would find objections to such an inductive
demonstration of religion. He would charge that
these so-called inductions were not complete and
exact, but imperfect — at best, only approximated
perfection. He would say, " They are not simple
colligations of facts, but they are theories built up
and superimposed upon them. They are not cautious,
exhaustive generalizations of coexistences ; but they
are hypotheses to which you have boldly leaped.
And the verification you appeal to, though in much
seeming to be given, is also in much wanting."

!Now, these objections I should not altogether
deny; but I should give to them this twofold an
swer, which ought fairly, it seems to me, to stop tne
mouth of the scientific objector, or of any objector
who usually accepts, without hesitation, current sci-
entific conclusions : First, in the previous chapters it
has been shown in general that every one of these
objections applies to science as well as to religion.
Secondly, in the positive presentation, in the present
chapter, not a single medium of proof is employed
in regard to which it is not or cannot be shown
10

21 S PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KXOWLEDGE.

that the very same argument, or its counterpart, is
customarily and confidently employed by science.
If one is to be rejected, then both should be re-
jected ; if one is to be trusted, then both should be
trusted.

To sum up, then, the argument of the last four
chapters. Science, equally with religion, has a faith-
basis. It uses intuition, authority, eyidence, and
probable inference, and is often destitute of possible
verification. Science, no more than religion, can
withhold nor does withhold its belief from the
supersensual, the immaterial, or the inconceiyable.
Inexactness, uncertainty, and variation in the results
of its labors, are faults found in science as well as
in religion. On the other hand, religion, as well
as science, has an experimental basis. It grounds
itself on observation ; it proceeds by induction, and
it confirms its truths by verifications and previsions.

In this similarity of science and religion is there
not something that should have practical influence
with tliat daily-increasing number who, while ac-
cepting implicitly all the established truths and even
the wildest speculations of science, look upon reli-
gion with suspicion, if not contempt ? "We commend
to all such the words of Huxley : " By science I
understand all knowledge which rests upon evidence
and reasoning of a like character to that which
claims our assent to ordinary scientific propositions,
and if any one is able to make good the assertion
that his theology rests upon valid evidence and

POSITIVE SCIEXTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 219

sound reasoning, then it appears to me that such
theology must take its place as a part of science."

I respectfully ask why the fundamental truths of
religion do not already stand in that category with
as good a right as the greater portion of what is
calJ ed science %

220 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

CHAPTEE VIII.

CONCLUSION.

A survey, then, of the relations of Physical and
Keligious Knowledge will bring a candid inquirer,
I believe, to these conclusions : There is no neces-
sary and rightful antagonism between Science and
Religion. The actual opposition existing is due to
the fact that each is, in many things, ignorant of
itself and ignorant of the other. A fuller mutual
acquaintance will so disclose to each its respective
field that former intrusions shall cease, and will so
fix the identitv of each that other enemies shall not,
as hitherto, be mistaken for it. More thorough
knowledge will also show that the claims both have
made to exclusive knowledge and supremacy cannot
be sustained. Each has similar weaknesses; each
has similar supports. Neither can overthrow the
other with safety to itself. Each, in fact, needs the
other, and should make of it an ally.

AVitJiout Science to correct and guide it, Reli-
gion is constantly going astray. The countless ex-
cesses and irrationalities of superstition, the varied
corruptions of every faith, adoration of stick an^

CONCLUSION. 221

etone, lizard or bull ; devil-worship, witchcraft, or-
gies of Bacchus, devouring rites of Moloch, and
unclean sacrifices to Yenus — all these illustrate the
mournful aberrations into which devotion inevita-
bly runs when divorced from understanding. Zeal,
without knowledge, as surely curses the world as
with knowledge it blesses it. Religion should en-
courage and urge the study of science, rather than
forbid it. The Church, instead of anathematizing
the great interpreters of Nature, should canonize
them. The truly devout beho'ld God's footsteps
everywhere ; and everywhere, in the depths of the
earth as in the heights of the sky, in forms of
matter as in the thoughts of men, should search for
" the fullness of him that filleth all in all."

The whole universe is the embodiment and man-
ifestation of its Creator. Every ray that streams
from every star, every leaf that hangs on every tree,
each living structure, each moving creature, tells the
attentive student something of the thoughts and
character of the Divine Artist. Nature, then, to
the religious man, is God's oldest Testament, his
most direct Scripture. The ideas disclosed in it are
God's thoughts ; Natural laws, Divine laws ; Natu-
ral History, a chapter of Natural Theology. To
every new investigation of the physicist, Religion
should say God-speed ; to every new discovery of the
savant, All-hail. The finding of a Codex Sinaiticus
should not rejoice the Church more than the dis-
covery of a new law in Nature.

222 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

And Religion needs not only to accept the cor-
rections and recognize the coadjutorship of Science
in disclosing the ways of God, but it should engraft
into itself, I believe, more of the scientific spirit.
Instead of aiming to defend systems already escab-
lished and to bolster np foregone conclusions, it
should go simply with inquiring mind to the eternal
facts. Casting aside all theological prepossessions
and pride of opinion, it should interrogate carefully
all the oracles of the world, without and within, and
patiently await, and humbly receive their answers.
Its only test of conclusions should be their truth
or falsehood — not their supposed soundness or un-
soundness, their flatteringness or humbringness, their
pleasure or their pain. It should never feign certi-
tude when it possesses none. It should discriminate
to itself, and own in its public teaching the differ-
ence between what in its realm is known and what
is but guessed at. It should employ more constantly
the scientific methods, gleaning its evidence from as
wide a field as possible ; sifting it with care, retain-
ing only what is fact, verifying each theory in some
satisfactory way before accepting it as proved.

Theology, as I have endeavored to show, is fully
able to bear such a scientific ordeal. In its essentials,
if not in other respects, it has all the elements of an
inductive science. " It includes," as has truly been
said, "a multitude of positive facts — facts of ob-
servation and experience having a relationship with
each other, and hence capable of classification and

CONCLUSION. 223

generalization, giving us positive knowledge up to a
certain point, and beyond that it includes a domain
of truth involved in the facts observed, and to be
divined by laying under those observed facts gen-
eral conceptions or hypotheses^ which, though larger
than our experience, must yet be true to our expe-
rience." Thus Religion is capable of being made a
genuine Science, and it will never, I believe, main-
tain the purity, attain the stability and accuracy,
reach unto the depth and breadth of truth which is
within the demands of its grand mission unto man-
kind, until it thus weds Science to itself.

And, similarly, Science needs the help and in-
spiration of Religion to fulfill the true measure of its
usefulness. Religion, without Science, is like writ-
ing a history without facts ; Science, without Reli-
gion, is a biography without a subject. Religion,
without Science, is a pyramid without base ; Science,
without Religion, is the pyramid without apex.

No one can earnestly study Nature without
taking the first steps on the road of Faith. As
he traces backward and forward the generations
of the world, he makes the acquaintance of that
which is no less than Eternal. As he meditates
the course of outspreading matter and space, he
recognizes that which is Infinite. As he tracks the
restless energies of the Kosmos, he comes to know
that which he cannot call less than Omnipotent.
TJhrough the multitudinous variety of the universe,
he discerns the Unity on the axis of which all turns —

224 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

the single centre from which all radiates. In the
contemplation of this stupendous power, the man of
science is absorbed. He believes that all happiness
depends upon the knowledge of it, and the conform-
ing of men's lives to it. He recognizes himself as
bound up with it, and is filled with inexpressible awe
as, in his studies, he enters into its marvelous secrets.
" It comes that," as Strauss says, " he demands for
his Kosmos the same piety that the devout man of
old demanded for his God." Thus Science imbues
its devotees with the spirit of worship ; leads them,
if not to the inner, nevertheless to the outer court of
Religion. Only one more step is needed — that from
the force to the Cause ; from the law to the Law-
giver— to bring them into the temple of God.

And this further step Science ought logically to
take. The boast of Bacon that he had taken all
knowledge as his province is the duty of Science
To ignore the whole domain of spiritual truth is
but half to perform its mission.

Religion has its facts as well as Science ; the im-
material thought, the self -directing will, the sense
of right and wrong, the consciousness of moral re-
sponsibility, these are facts as much as attraction of
magnet or undulation of sound-wave. Sublime as-
pirations, immortal longings which protoplasm can-
not account for ; heroisms and self-sacrifices not to
be explained on the principle of the greatest good
of the greatest number ; a current in human af-
fairs that runs steadily toward the right, the true,

CONCLUSION. 225

and the good — these, also, are facts. A complete
science ought to study these facts candidly, and
draw from them their logical inductions — soul and
God ; a complete science should take note, not
only of the verifications of physical doctrines, in
physical experience, but of these equally strong
verifications in spiritual experience of spiritual
truths. It should own the force not onlv of those
native predispositions that assure us of Nature's
constancy and Matter's indestructibility, but of those
ineradicable convictions that asseverate the soul's
immortality. It should recognize not only the
questioning of the human mind for second causes,
but its imperative demand for the First Cause.
Does it become Science to exert itself so diligently
merely to pass from effect to anterior effect, from
one law to another law, only a little more simple,
but never ask what is the prime power on which all
depend — the Lawgiver behind all the laws ? Shall
it trace with such painstaking assiduity every thread
of the Kosmos, each hair-breadth of those exquisite
webs of interacting laws, so harmoniously blended,
so pervaded with the tokens of profoundest intelli-
gence, and then, when we ask for the Weaver of this
infinite marvel, the Reality behind this veil — tell
us there is none — the veil is all f Xo ! The true
man of science must work with that conviction un-
der which "Whewell says he wrote his " Philosophy
of the Inductive Sciences," " that no philosophy of
the universe can satisfy the minds of thoughtful

226 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

men which does not deal with such questions as in-
evitably force themselves upon our notice, respect-
ing the Author and the object of the universe ; and
also under the conviction that every philosophy of
the universe which has any consistency must sug-
gest answers, at least, conjectural, to such questions.
No Kosmos is complete from which the question of
Deity is excluded ; and all Kosmology has a side
turned toward Theolo^v.''

It is through the mastering and manifestation of
this theological side, this Godward face, that Sci-
ence delivers to mankind its noblest message. That
which makes Science something more than the
gratification of an idle curiosity or a low-lived utili-
tarianism— that which gives to it in the thoughts of
the higher-minded a sacred dignity — is the belief
that by it we are daily making clearer and clearer
the ways of that Infinite Power, the features of
that Divine Image, which all things shadow forth.

Soon may that happy day — happy for both alike
— dawn upon the world, when Religion and Science,
recognizing the common ground on which they
stand, the similar methods, objects, and results which
characterize each, the need they stand in of each
other, the one God of whom they both prophesy,
shall cordially join hands in his service !

THE END.

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